93% The Central Park Five

All Critics (43) | Top Critics (18) | Fresh (40) | Rotten (3)

The film offers a snapshot of the white hysteria then gripping the city, which was stoked by the tabloids and resulted in police and prosecutors railroading five black youths into prison.

An unusually good documentary about an outlandish miscarriage of justice.

Involves a detailed reconstruction of how the story broke, was developed and was dramatized by lurid tabloid headlines.

Central Park is at first discomforting, then enraging, then illuminating.

What she and her father and husband have drawn from this material is a combustible amalgam: a movie about justice violated, rectified, and denied.

A careful, thoughtful documentary that meticulously re-creates what happened on that night and details how and why everything went so terribly off-course.

A miscarriage of justice on this scale would have been tragic had it resulted from an honest mistake - but, as this meticulously researched movie makes clear, honesty had little to do with it.

The [documentary] team builds a solid story from the time of the crime through the release from prison those wrongly accused and railroaded into confessing to a crime they did not commit.

The result is both compelling and infuriating.

The Central Park Five provides background drawn from contemporary media images, including crime scene footage accompanied by a detective's grisly description, as well as reflections by those involved.

Not only gripping and heartbreaking, but terrifying.

At times, this is a devastating film, one that acknowledges the desire for but refuses to buy into an easy answer.

Among all of the case's horrors, one of the strongest is that a serial rapist ultimately cared more about the truth than the prosecution.

A wonderfully vital, illuminating study of the New York of 20-plus years ago.

... a respectable but often tedious film that adds little to what is already well known about this episode

The film is well balanced visually, well paced and successful at voicing its outrage (the NYPD refused to comment). But "The Central Park Five" leaves questions unanswered...

Depressing documentary about a rush to judgment over one of NYC's most notorious and heinous crimes."

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_central_park_five_2012/

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