Directing: A+
Writing: A
Cinematography: A
Editing: A+

Time is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. It’s one of the best films I have ever seen, period. It’s easily the first documentary I ever watched at home and wished I could have seen its beautiful, poetic visuals on the big screen. How often do you see a documentary film this absorbing, this visually arresting? This is generally not a thing that happens.

If only every person in America were required to watch this. I literally just finished watching minutes ago, and I’m still emotional. Will my enthusiasm, right out of the gate, seem hyperbolic over time? I doubt it. This might just be a game-changer in its genre.

And predictably, racist trolls flock to websites where they can contribute terrible scores to this movie just to bring the averages down. “Do the crime, do the time,” says one—and many others. This racist dipshit clearly did not bother to watch the movie, because not only does he miss the point by a mile, but Fox Rich, the truly extraordinary woman at the center of this film, actually addresses that phrase directly during a speech. Do people like this really think she’s never heard that shit before?

This is a woman who, after serving twelve years in prison herself, has developed into a business owner with some real success and legitimacy. Garrett Bradley, the woman who directs Time with a sensitive eye quite possibly never seen on screen before, never belabors this point, or even calls it out directly in any way. She lets these details speak for themselves.

And Fox Rich, she speaks for herself, and her family, and her incarcerated husband, with fierce resolve and passion. “Our prison system is nothing more than slavery,” she says. This is something we’ve all heard many times, thought it doesn’t make it any less true. Then she adds, “And I see myself as an abolitionist.” Truly, we all should.

Rich and her husband, Rob, robbed a bank in their home state of Louisiana in 1997. Fox’s mother is one of the interview subjects, and she’s possibly the most fascinating character here, behind Fox herself. She speaks about how they were both offered a plea deal that would lower their sentencing to twelve years, which Fox accepted, and Rob did not. Time never tells us why he made that choice. I could probably research it, but in this case I am so impressed by the film, I have chosen just to trust the filmmaker’s choices. Even its black and white cinematography is inspired.

The more salient point is that, instead, Rob was sentenced to sixty years in prison. Sixty years. Some people may want to argue the justification of such a sentencing for attempted armed robbery of a bank, but that’s not the conversation we need to be having. What we should be discussing is the clear inequity involved here. There are people serving a fraction of that sentence for murder.

And Fox Rich, once she’s out of prison—and, apparently, one for spending a lot of time recording home movies, from the nineties to the present day—is of single-minded tenacity. She raises her six children to be model citizens (we even see footage of one becoming a dentist). She truly makes something of herself, and becomes an inspiration of others, a picture of hard work and redemption. And through it all, she never stops working at getting her husband out of jail.

For two decades he was in prison, allowed two, two-hour visits with his wife per month. I thought a lot about how that must inevitably weight heavy on their future together once he’s actually home again. Garrett Bradley wisely keeps that out of the narrative here, both because not enough time has passed anyway, and because it’s more effective to end on a joyous note. And trust me on this one: you’ll want to have tissues at the ready.

Time is also an incredible feat of editing, two decades’ worth of footage cut down to a brisk 81 minutes. We see the children grow up, we see Fox get older, and it’s all done with precision and clarity, not a single wasted moment. Occasionally we get a long shot, longer than most. Fox spends a lot of time on the phone, working tenaciously day by day, calling judges’ secretaries about when a ruling will get written, and the like. In one stunning scene, we see her, just once, most from being the picture of calm, to letting her completely understandable fury break through. “These people have no respect for human life,” she says. And she’s right.

And yet, for a movie that could be truly, deeply depressing, the overall tone of Time is one of great uplift. It’s a work of art, and it ends in triumph. Its entire construction is a triumph. Get yourself onto Prime Video and watch it, right now.

Overall: A+