It's not a new story, true, but "West of Memphis" makes it both extremely personal and universally painful.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 5, 2013

The film is so utterly transfixing you won't believe almost two-and-a-half hours have passed when the final credits roll.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 29, 2013

We feel like we're watching an overlong true-crime television episode and not a movie.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 21, 2013

Moving and gruesome, West of Memphis is an eloquent disquisition on the banality of evil.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 15, 2013

A real-life horror story, made no less shocking by the familiarity of its early scenes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 14, 2013

While the "Paradise Lost" films captured events as they unfolded in the heat of battle, "West of Memphis" has the luxury of at least partial closure.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 14, 2013

It tells the story of a terrible crime compounded by a grave injustice that's been remedied, but only in part, so it's impossible to have a single or simple response to the movie.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 8, 2013

What sets this film apart from previous efforts to document the story is that Jackson and Walsh financed a private investigative team with legal and forensic experts who re-examined old evidence, conducted new interviews and found new witnesses.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 1, 2013

The new film is largely a recap of the older ones, with more celebrity testimonials and fewer Metallica songs but little fresh insight into the miscarriage of justice it chronicles.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 25, 2013

Happy, sad, inspiring, infuriating, right and terribly wrong, all at the same time.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 25, 2013

Berg's film is as much an indictment of the state of Arkansas' legal system as it is the prosecution.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 24, 2013

Berg's film helps illuminate a case that should certainly be the shame of the state of Arkansas, and perhaps the criminal justice system of the entire United States.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 17, 2013

Dubious evidence; suspicious confessions; conveniently located "poor white trash" (Echols' words) to take the rap: The case stank from the beginning, Berg's film argues.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 17, 2013

Less an investigative report than a portrait of the community that forms around an ongoing court case, this conveys a patient understanding of the intricacies of law and human behavior that may be termed Kieslowskian.

| Jan 17, 2013

"West of Memphis" is the fourth film about one of the most heinous cases of wrongful conviction in American judicial history. Do we need a fourth film? Yes, I think we do.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 17, 2013

It artfully sketches out the events for anyone who's coming in cold, but basically, its strategy is to take what we already know and go deeper.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 9, 2013

A lot of it is treading on ground that's been laid by other people, but there's a lot of great new stuff, too.

| Original Score: 7.3/10 | Jan 4, 2013

An extraordinary story told with utter conviction but not without a certain sympathy for the court of public opinion - which wrecked the chance of proper justice for the accused for so long.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 27, 2012

It took way too long, but the crowd finally bested the mob.

| Dec 27, 2012

Take this as ultimately more personal journal than investigation.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 25, 2012