Metacritic reviews

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.

Substantive and stunning, the documentary Time delivers on the title’s promise of the monumental as well as the personal.

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.

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.

The last few moments contain some of the most exhilarating and moving moments ever committed to film.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.