Time
Amazon Studios | Release Date: October 9, 2020 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
91
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 23 Critic Reviews
Positive:
23
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Sarah Tai-BlackOct 15, 2020
It’s a document of mutual care; a self-authored family archive magnified by the scope of its editor and platform; and a compassionately rendered adaptation of the ways in which we feel the tempo, intervals, duration and memory of time. Read full review
100
Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsOct 15, 2020
What distinguishes this documentary from other movies about mass incarceration is the novelty with which Bradley subverts the mass and trains our eye, frequently literally, on the particular. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleCary DarlingOct 13, 2020
Exquisite and moving documentary. Read full review
100
The Associated PressMark KennedyOct 8, 2020
The last few moments contain some of the most exhilarating and moving moments ever committed to film. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangOct 8, 2020
Time can make you weep for a hundred reasons, from joy, pain or recognition, but its wounds and its glories are finally inextricable from one of the paradoxes of moviemaking itself. Cinema can magically compress decades into hours and transform lives into narratives, but what it erects here is ultimately a monument to something irretrievable. Cherish every moment of this movie, because each one stands in for all the others that have been lost. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternOct 8, 2020
A sociologist might call Time a longitudinal study, a document whose value is enhanced by the decades it spans. I’d call it a joyous tribute to love and resilience, and a case study in eclectic technique. Read full review
100
The New York TimesLisa KennedyOct 8, 2020
Substantive and stunning, the documentary Time delivers on the title’s promise of the monumental as well as the personal. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy BurrOct 7, 2020
Time is not a cut-and-dried chronology. Rather it’s a poetic rumination on atonement and endurance, one that chops up and reorders time itself to give us a powerful portrait of a woman who refuses to take no for an answer. Read full review
91
IndieWireDavid EhrlichOct 28, 2020
While gripping from start to finish, there isn’t a minute of “Time” that feels engineered for our entertainment. And though Bradley’s grounded footage can seem at odds with Fox’s home videos — like ice floes dropped into a rushing spring — they ultimately melt together into the film’s most profound moments of enduring love. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattOct 16, 2020
It tells a story as urgent and beautifully human as almost anything on screen this year. Read full review
90
Vanity FairRichard LawsonOct 8, 2020
It’s not a demure film, by any measure, nor does it shy away from hard truths. What it does is allow the Riches the loveliness and grain of their individual being, and lets that be enough. The rest of the film’s mission, then, is what we in the audience do with what Bradley, and Rich, have graciously shown us. Time appeals to heart and mind. It also, hopefully, convinces us of their capacity for action. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreOct 8, 2020
Time is an extraordinary documentary from director and artist Garrett Bradley, who didn’t make a film about Rich and her family so much as make one with them. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comOdie HendersonOct 9, 2020
With these scenes highlighting growth and resilience, Time refuses to be some kind of tragedy porn. Sibil and her brood demand justice, not pity. Her strength carries the film and elevates her sons toward success. Read full review
88
Slant MagazinePat BrownSep 12, 2020
It reminds us in eminently cinematic ways that behind the numbers and procedures of a court case are actual lives existing in actual, human time. Read full review
85
TheWrapSteve PondOct 15, 2020
A meditation that measures social failings in the toll they take on individuals, Time builds to scenes that are almost shocking in their intimacy. It stays away from polemic but hits all the harder for its restraint. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Oct 9, 2020
Bradley, who’s worked mainly in narrative cinema, lends a sharp eye for composition and a poet’s sensibility. This is a beautifully shot film that’s as interested in studying the changing faces of its subjects as laying out their struggle from end to end. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawOct 20, 2020
The point of the film is Sibil’s decades-long ordeal and she emerges with heroic and compelling dignity. Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerOct 19, 2020
Time may be shot in black and white but the world it captures is anything but clear-cut. By turns moving and angry, it’s a thought-provoking hymn to love, family and the power of Black female courage. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeOct 18, 2020
In Time it’s an almost superhuman sense of togetherness that rings through, a refusal to bow down, to be broken or defeated. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicShaena MontanariOct 16, 2020
The Richardsons’ thought-provoking journey leaves you pondering not just the pain and turmoil created by the criminal justice system, but the incredible life-giving strength of love. Read full review
80
CineVueMatthew AndersonOct 13, 2020
Positing the question of whether the principal objective of incarceration is punishment, rehabilitation or undue persecution, Garrett Bradley’s Time is another vital addition to a growing canon of films to pointedly critique the US legal and prison systems’ unjust treatment of people of colour. Read full review
75
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenOct 21, 2020
Time puts a face—and a family—to the systemic injustice within the American prison system, asking why it took an extraordinary woman’s extraordinary efforts to reclaim basic human rights. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneKatie WalshOct 7, 2020
Bradley’s film is a lyrical documentary, a piece that feels like a poem or a prayer, an almost meditative experience, set to a plaintive piano score. Read full review
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