Bisbee '17 speaks to the stakes of local history and amateur genealogy for places and people that are twinkling out of living memory.

| Oct 30, 2018

A fascinating exercise in nonfiction filmmaking as a performative, interdisciplinary, collective act, as well as a provocative inquiry into how selective memory, ideology, shame and unspeakable trauma shape what we come to accept as official history.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 24, 2018

The film's epic canvas fuses a procedural documentary with tableaux that wouldn't be out of place in a horror western.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 19, 2018

With more intimate documentaries like Kate Plays Christine and Kati With an I, director Robert Greene has always found space for enigma in motivation, in a lack of resolution: Bisbee '17 cannot afford such space.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 4, 2018

It would be enough for any documentary to tell this piece of hushed-up history, but Bisbee '17 is onto something more radical; watching it is like witnessing the defusing of a time bomb from a foot away.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 1, 2018

An interesting if unfulfilling documentary experiment...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 27, 2018

Greene has made a hard movie to argue with, even as he invites you to do exactly that.

| Sep 25, 2018

In some respects "Bisbee '17" serves as a kind of therapy for the town. But it's still difficult material.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 11, 2018

[Robert] Greene's film moves in a forward, circular motion, through swift, precise interviews and extraordinarily evocative images of the mines that continue to remind us where we are.

| Sep 10, 2018

Greene's movie... grows into an adventurous exercise in drama-documentary; what could have seemed arch or awkward is handled with grace and tact, and there is even a song.

| Sep 10, 2018

Like many arty contemporary documentaries, Bisbee '17 is rather theatrical. But that's reasonable in this case...

| Sep 6, 2018

There's no denying that Bisbee '17 has some moments of deep elegiac power or, for that matter, that Greene's ambition is boundless.

| Original Score: B | Sep 6, 2018

Remembering the past is not enough to prevent its recurrence. It has to be kept alive.

| Sep 5, 2018

The sheer audacity and originality of the exercise makes it a must-see, regardless of what you might think of the success or failure of any particular choice.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 5, 2018

Like all of Greene's films, it's more of a cannily controlled meditation than a traditional attempt at semi-objective portraiture, deliberately blurring the line between documentation and performance.

| Original Score: B | Sep 4, 2018

Even though "Bisbee '17" depicts a wholesome and harmonious community undertaking, it is a profoundly haunted and haunting film.

| Sep 4, 2018

The director purposefully pulls us this way and that, weaving cinematic spells and then yanking us out of them; as viewers, we are both inside and outside the story.

| Sep 4, 2018

It's a shameful episode that Greene contends has never been properly acknowledged in the town... It's a good story, but despite his command of camera, music and mood, the film plays a little like a protracted rehearsal for a cosplay re-enactment.

| Jul 27, 2018

The film is rich and multifaceted, as Greene employs an array of styles (historical reenactments, direct cinema-style portraiture, musical numbers) to investigate the complex relationship between Bisbee's past and present.

| Mar 29, 2018

In "Bisbee '17," Greene peels the layers of oblivion off history like so many layers of paint.

| Jan 27, 2018