PARADISE LOST: THE CHILD MURDERS AT ROBIN HOOD HILLS (85)

Directed by: Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky

The Pitch: The story of three Arkansas teens, who - mostly on the basis of being misfits and considered "weird" by their small town - were charged with the 1993 murders of three little boys.

Theo Sez: The rating might be even higher had I seen enough documentaries to feel confident that this really is as exceptional as it seems (certainly - unlike, say, THE THIN BLUE LINE - it's hard to make a case for it as cinematically exceptional : it's a fairly straightforward documentary). There are other caveats - a suspicion that the film-makers aren't as neutral as they might be (there are occasional cheap shots, like an insert of the gallery - full of black-clad spectators - when a prosecution witness declares that wearing black is a sure sign of devil-worship), and even a slight feeling of condescension, big-city liberals reporting on the barbaric customs of these ignorant hicks. Mostly, however, the hicks in question are so scarily self-possessed it's impossible to feel they're being patronised, and so closely observed (not to say laid bare) it's impossible not to be riveted by the unfolding story : it's utterly compulsive, a maelstrom of conflicting emotions and the most engrossing two-and-a-half hours of the year. It would be tremendous even just as courtroom drama, that most debased of genres (it's a shock, after a lifetime of hokey movie-watching, to see the judge asking for and getting total silence when the verdicts are announced), but it goes way beyond that, into other themes - small-town bigotry, the unknowability of Truth, the role of the media (and of the film-makers themselves) in the judicial process - and finally to a glimpse of what seems to be pure evil, or at least as close to it as this viewer ever wants to come. That this last point isn't pressed or even made a big deal of, its horrible implications left to suppurate beneath the impassive documentary surface, only makes it - and of course the film - all the more chilling.