Capturing the Friedmans (2003)
HBO, Notorious Pictures

Description

Despite their predilection for hamming it up in front of home-movie cameras, the Friedmans were a normal middle-class family living in the affluent New York suburb of Great Neck. One Thanksgiving, as the family gathers at home for a quiet holiday dinner, their front door explodes, splintered by a police battering ram. Officers rush into the house, accusing Arnold Friedman and his youngest son Jesse of hundreds of shocking crimes. The film follows their story from the public?s perspective and through unique real footage of the family in crisis, shot inside the Friedman house. As the police investigate, and the community reacts, the fabric of the family begins to disintegrate, revealing provocative questions about truth, justice, family, and - ultimately - truth.

Tags

Oscar nomination, New York, 1980s, Sundance award winner, Court cases

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Empire | Adam Smith

Unique, often disturbing as well as provocative, Capturing The Friedmans is a dazzlingly original debut from Jarecki and evidence that the documentary - for so long a poor relation of the movie world - is indeed back with a vengeance.
Read full review (Cinema)

10 Washington Post | Ann Hornaday

Jarecki has created a tour de force of narrative ambiguity, and in doing so has made one of the most honest reality shows ever.
Read full review (Cinema)

10 Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

Andrew Jarecki, the film's director, brilliantly employs their home-movie footage to create a disarming study of a middle-class Jewish family as fractious in its closeness as Alex Portnoy's and as scalded by hidden psychic wounds as the clan in ''Long Day's Journey Into Night.''
Read full review (Cinema)

10 DVD File | Joshua Zyber

If the vaunted Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had any convictions at all, they might some day realize that it is finally time to stop ghettoizing documentaries into their own little-heralded category, time to recognize that a documentary may even be the best picture of the year. Capturing the Friedmans was the best picture released in 2003, no contest.
Read full review (DVD)

10 digitallyobsessed.com | Jon Danziger

As disturbing and moving a film as you're ever likely to see, Capturing the Friedmans is a tale of family life gone awry, and a meditation on memory and truth every bit as profound as Rashomon and Absalom, Absalom! That's rarified company, but then, this is an extraordinary movie, on par with the best of the Maysles brothers and Frederick Wiseman.
Read full review (DVD)

10 New York Times | Elvis Mitchell

In ''Capturing the Friedmans,'' which opens today in New York, Mr. Jarecki finds a way to show that denial and hope often grow from the same vine. Lives are built around the way they're harvested -- and this talented director has a feel for the soil.
Read full review (Cinema)

9.6 DVD Verdict | Adam Arsenau

Capturing the Friedmans, above all else, is about the self-destruction of a family; and, as such, it hits hard, no matter how you choose to pass judgment on it. The film is elusive, gripping, entertaining, but stunningly profound.
Read full review (DVD)

9.2 The Onion A.V. Club | Scott Tobias

Like an Atom Egoyan movie come to life, or the other side of the Louds in PBS' 1973 documentary series An American Family, Capturing The Friedmans looks at a suburban clan through the prism of the video age, where the truth isn't as clear as it looks from the camera's eye.
Read full review (Cinema)

9.0 Amazon user reviews

Arnold and Elaine Friedman had a normal life with their three sons until Arnold was arrested on multiple (and increasingly lurid) charges of child abuse. Because the Friedmans had documented their own lives with copious home movies, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki is able to sift through their material looking for clues. Yet what emerges is more surreal than fiction.
Read full review (DVD)

9.0 DVD Talk | Matthew Millheiser

Capturing the Friedmans is one of the most riveting and repugnant films I have ever seen. It is every bit as brilliant as it is disturbing.
Read full review (DVD)

9.0 Variety | Scott Foundas

The truth is not only stranger than fiction but frequently indistinguishable from it in Andrew Jarecki's "Capturing the Friedmans," a startling documentary that takes the widely publicized child molestation case of the 1980s and works it into a stirring examination of truth at odds with perception, the high price of privacy in the media era and the blinding veil of blood ties.
Read full review (Cinema)

8.8 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

The film is as an instructive lesson about the elusiveness of facts, especially in a legal context. Sometimes guilt and innocence are discovered in court, but sometimes, we gather, only truths about the law are demonstrated.
Read full review (Cinema)

8.8 Rolling Stone | Will Dana

Director Andrew Jarecki dissects the case of a Long Island teacher and his eighteen-year-old son who were accused of sexually abusing young boys and turns it into grand suburban tragedy.
Read full review (Cinema)

8.8 Reel | James Berardinelli

First and foremost, however, [Capturing the Friedmans] is an American tragedy – a look inside a criminal case that shines a light into the dark, ugly corners of suburbia, then turns that same light on various other aspects of crime & punishment.
Read full review (Cinema)

8.0 LA Weekly | Ella Taylor

One wishes that those who judged the Friedmans had shown the same appreciation for ambiguity and complexity. Capturing the Friedmans snakes along, confounding us — as it should — with every twist and turn of the “evidence,” every piece of wildly contradictory testimony.
Read full review (Cinema)

8.0 PopMatters.com | Cynthia Fuchs

Capturing the Friedmans also undermines its own ostensible project, to find a truth, to get at a story that makes sense, that explains what happened. And so, the project becomes much more complicated, dense, and endless. The film bravely turns in on itself, resolving nothing and capturing less.
Read full review (Cinema)

7.5 Combustible Celluloid | Jeffrey M. Anderson

It's a truly bizarre film, joining this year's many unusual documentaries from Stone Reader to Stevie. And in point of fact, I never want to think about the Friedman family again, but I can't deny that Capturing the Friedmans is a hugely powerful documentary, and one that deserves its due.
Read full review (Cinema)

7.0 Slate | Harvey A. Silverglate and Carl Takei

Capturing the Friedmans made a studied decision to minimize the historical context of the charges for the sake of drama. Had the filmmakers placed the case in full perspective and included the overwhelming evidence they had uncovered against the prosecution, the movie would have been less evenhanded but perhaps more responsible.
Read full review (DVD)

5.0 Los Angeles Times | Kenneth Turan

... the Friedmans turn out to be a stranger and messier bunch than this film is comfortable with or quite knows how to handle.
Read full review (Cinema)