Stirring and thought provoking, intimate and a work of quiet genius.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 20, 2020

A shocking and moving family portrait, a bittersweet look at sibling rivalries and how they can affect a family years after the children have grown up.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 5, 2019

Director makes mea culpa a major theme, pleading that admitting her own selfish priorities as a rationalization, but it is insufficient to counter the intrusive images.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 2, 2016

This film should be shown to every parent of a gay child.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 16, 2013

A film that will fascinate inquisitive viewers on multiple levels.

| Sep 16, 2013

While Reed's own self-exposure shows insight, her presentation of her brother's suffering comes across as an unprocessed spectacle of misery that hasn't been adequately thought out.

| Jul 1, 2013

Documents a moment in a few very specific lives that anyone with a heart and mind can understand and recognise.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 19, 2011

A multilayered portrait of immense physical, emotional and psychological change.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 19, 2010

Some of the footage is harrowing, some of it moving, but all of it fearlessly real and affecting.

| Aug 11, 2010

This combination of amazing coincidences, sibling tensions and identity crises is a natural fit for the documentary form.

| Original Score: B | Apr 22, 2010

An exceptional film...(that helps) illuminate the often painful experience of people trying to move on from dark personal and family pasts.

| Original Score: B | Mar 19, 2010

Prodigal Sons is crazily overstuffed with material, but the material is so strong and so endlessly surprising I can't blame Reed for her reluctance to leave anything out.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 19, 2010

At the heart of Prodigal Sons, a family drama in the form of a succinct, eloquent personal journal, is a sibling rivalry whose reverberations touch upon the very essence of human identity...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2010

In an era of pop documentaries that reduce their subjects to gimmicky setups and patronizing lessons, Prodigal Sons is a near-profound palate cleanser.

| Original Score: A- | Mar 17, 2010

A consistently generous film.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 12, 2010

Kimberly Reed started out to make a movie about starting over, but then life got in the way. It didn't make her job harder. It made the movie better.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 12, 2010

The problem with family-diary documentaries is that some families have too much drama for just one movie.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 12, 2010

The past in Prodigal Sons is pervasive and formidable, to be sure, but it is hardly fixed.

| Mar 11, 2010

[An] engrossing, unpredictable, often heartbreaking family-drama documentary.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 10, 2010

Sometimes we forget that when documentary filmmakers begin a project, they don't always know what they'll be filming because, to state the obvious, real life doesn't work from a script.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 4, 2010