West of Memphis

Amy Berg, 2012, USA, 147mins. Certificate: 15

Three teenagers convicted in 1994 for the brutal murder of three boys a year before and sentenced to death. The justice system of West Memphis, Arkansas is eventually the one to be put into trial after an extraordinary and, at times, high-profile, crusade to not only save their lives, but to acquit them as well.
Produced by Peter Jackson (“The Lord of the Rings” trilogy) and and his partner, Fran Walsh, and directed by Amy Berg, this acclaimed, BAFTA-nominated documentary is about the miscarriages of justice, the ever-present debate about the death penalty but also in itself a meticulous, ongoing investigation on what TRULY happened, with the case reopening 18 years after “The Memphis Three” were originally convicted…

Reviews

***** “Prepare to be shocked, disturbed, awed… and, if you expected justice to prevail at last, ultimately devastated.” David Hughes, www.empireonline.com

**** “The case of the West Memphis Three has evolved in the last 20 years from a lurid true-crime story into one of the biggest miscarriage of justice scandals in modern US history.(…) A gripping documentary.” Peter Bradshaw, www.theguardian.com

**** “Amy Berg’s long, fiercely compelling, often angry-making film is about the weighted scales of US justice, and amounts to a fight for fairness: when you have to settle for the best redress a corrupt judicial system can give you, it may be time to clean house.” Tim Robey, www.telegraph.co.uk

“Whether you’ve never heard of the 1993 West Memphis Three case (…), this is a compelling and comprehensive guide to one of the most Kafkaesque crime stories in American history.” Sara Stewart, New York Post nypost.com