Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Fox Rich, indomitable matriarch and modern-day abolitionist, strives to keep her family together while fighting for the release of her incarcerated husband. An intimate, epic, and unconventional love story, filmed over two decades.
Time is a formally striking documentary that blends decades of home video footage with Garrett Bradley's luminous black-and-white cinematography to create something genuinely distinctive. The visual contrast between archival color and present-day monochrome is inspired and gives the film an almost mythic quality. Fox Rich's story is compelling and emotionally resonant, and the film's structure — non-linear, impressionistic — is far from conventional documentary filmmaking. Acting is less relevant as a category here, though Rich's presence on camera is magnetic. The ending, while emotionally satisfying given the circumstances, feels slightly muted in documentary terms — life doesn't always provide the clean catharsis narrative cinema does, and that ambivalence is both honest and slightly unsatisfying cinematically.