time movie reviews

‘Time’: A Woman’s Life, A Man’s Imprisonment, A Portrait of Love Everlasting

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

There’s a pair of shattering moments at the heart of the 2016 short documentary Alone , directed by Garrett Bradley, that opens the door to the world the filmmaker complicates and expounds upon in her new, feature-length documentary Time . ( Bradley’s latest, which receives a limited theatrical run this week, launches on Amazon Prime Streaming on October 16th.) The first comes when the young woman at its center, Aloné Watts, reveals to her family that she plans to marry Desmond Watson, a man in prison. We have already seen her trying on a wedding dress; we have already heard her say, in a voiceover, “I am beautiful in this dress.” But then Aloné reveals her intentions to her family, and something breaks — loudly. Bradley’s camera rests on the image of Watts’s family home for the extent of the scene. But the sound creates a gap: the voices we hear hit us as if we are inside, at Aloné’s side, when she breaks the news. And what we hear, as loudly and immediately as if they were being hurled in our direction, are screams. A streak of reprimands, heartbreak, and astonished doubt as white-hot as a lightning bolt. All of it born of fear; you can hear it in each voice. Aloné, her family tries to tell her, is going to waste her life. This is not advice. It is, in their eyes, a certainty. 

She later meets with a woman whose voice, though softer, is just as wise and equally certain — this is the next shattering moment. “This system breaks you apart,” the woman tells Aloné. “It is designed, just like slavery, to tear you apart. And instead of using a whip, they use time. They use hardships.” It’s like, she says, “when they used to hang people, but barely hang them, and leave their feet just tip-toeing in the mud. So that they’re constantly on their tip toes, fighting for their lives.”

This woman, a preacher and poet in spirit, if not by trade, is Sibil Fox Richardson, who goes by Fox Rich. It’s Rich’s story that Bradley tells in Time — though “tells” already vastly oversimplifies what Bradley and Rich, together, have accomplished in this remarkable movie. Both Alone and this new  documentary are urgent, lacerating films about black families grappling with the incarceration of loved ones. Both are, more specifically, about the lives of black women, either married to or on the cusp of marrying men who are not free. Women whose sense of their lives, as narrated to us in each film, is that they, too, are not free, and that they will not be so long as the men they love remain incarcerated.

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Time would not exist but for a surprising gesture. Bradley had already finished shooting what was to become a short film on Rich when, on the last day of shooting, Rich stopped Bradley to give the filmmaker a box of tapes. Video diaries, more specifically, spanning 18 years and recorded by Rich and occasionally her children on a mini-DV camera. These videos largely record the mundane: the everyday bits of life, especially with growing children, that are most easily taken for granted until they are lost to us. They are letters to Rich’s husband, Robert Richardson. For their nearly two-decade span, Robert is away serving a 60-year prison sentence without parole, for an armed robbery the pair committed (with a nephew) when they were young, newly married, and desperate for money. Rich had been sentenced to 13 years for the crime; she served three and a half. What followed that ordeal — and what Rich’s video diaries painstakingly document — is the life she lived thereon, without her husband, as a single mother caring for the couple’s six children, two of whom were young twins. This is what goes unsaid in Fox’s brief scene in Alone : It’s the history you hear in her voice when she says, “This system breaks you apart.”

With Time, Garrett Bradley has taken a well-chosen and gorgeously organized sample of Rich’s video diaries and wedded them to recent footage, this time filmed by Bradley and a trio of cinematographers. These scenes, which are somehow equally personal, documents Rich’s still-ongoing fight to get her husband parole. He has, by this time, served nearly 18 years. Rich’s goal is to get him home before the 18th birthday of the twins. 

There was a linear throughway available to Bradley here, one that would have told this story in straight chronology, moving from the self-recorded snapshots of Rich and her children enduring the span of Robert’s time in prison to the near-present, when Robert is still in prison and Rich, now a gainfully employed prison abolitionist, is still fighting for his life. Their life. That version of Time would likely be satisfying, too, and perhaps provide more in the way of straight information about, among other things, the case. 

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But this isn’t a true crime documentary. Against the grain of that genre, it redirects our attention from the crime of this couple to the crime of the system. In the first place, there’s an argument to be made — in fact, by giving ample space to Rich’s own confrontation with the question of forgiveness over the years, Time convincingly makes it — for asking fewer questions about what people did to “deserve” imprisonment and more questions about prison’s impact, not only on the people inside, but on the people waiting for them to come home. For this family and many others, incarceration is the absence of a father, a husband. It’s an absence that structures the rest of the family’s life. 

Bradley opts to make us feel that absence — to witness it, reckon with it, be shocked by it. She does this by finding a non-linear order for telling this story, one that still has a broad narrative arc (the fight for Robert’s parole) but which encourages us to abandon ourselves to the flow of Rich’s ideas and emotions. There is no everyday life that is unaffected by her husband’s absence. But he’s always on her mind, even when she cannot see or hear him. Even when we don’t see him in Bradley’s film, he’s on ours. 

Time incites questions and associations and feelings , all hallmarks of thoughtful editing, though rarely is the effect so generative as it is here. The mini-DV transfers of Rich’s diaries are so pointedly clean and sharp that her movie’s own black and white images flow close enough to seamlessly to be even more uncanny than if they’d been all of a piece. She allows things to shock us: the image of the Richardson children as children in one instance, then the sight (and sound) of them as college students the next. How can this, in itself, prove to be so moving? 

What distinguishes this documentary from other movies about mass incarceration is the novelty with which Bradley subverts the mass and trains our eye, frequently literally, on the particular. Films about imprisonment often feature the family, if only because the family is usually easier to access than the people behind bars. But talking to those wives and sons and daughters is one thing. Bradley has not only Rich’s footage to her advantage, but her own incredible perceptiveness to guide her, and a real intelligence for how to let a face tell the story of an entire scene. In this, she’s guided by Rich herself — who is, among other things, an incredible camera presence. (A cut, early on, from Rich in one of her video diaries to her shooting a local commercial proves this point so well, it’s almost jarring.) It feels as if Bradley has gone out of her way to pick up visual cues from her subject’s own video footage — to converse with those diaries, rather than simply complement or contextualize them. Rich’s footage was for her husband. It shows she wanted him to see what he’s missed all these years, from a world outside of a cell to his children’s faces. Intimate details, in other words: lives in loving close-up. 

This is what Bradley matches in her own attentive, careful filmmaking, zeroing in on the family as if she, too, wants to give Robert something to see: his wife. Bradley’s footage — down to the fact that it, like Rich’s, is in black and white, and is limited to the same aspect ratio — somehow avoids the problem of feeling like an intervening gaze from an outsider. But being an outsider has its benefits too, because it affords Bradley her own ideas. The mere organization of this movie, the associations Bradley finds between past and present, “video diary” versus “documentary,” are a case in point; it’s the stitching that gives away the dividing line between these merged projects. But so is the way the filmmaker trains her attention on Rich in moments both grand and mundane. 

There’s a stirring sequence here, for example, that collects a series of speeches Rich has given over the years about her experience with the prison system; you’re right to feel, here, as if the movie is rooting for her to win. But the ideas are in the editing, too. The movie makes a point of including the moment that Rich announces the date in each of her diaries, which confer less a sense of time passing than of, more interestingly, her commitment to marking time. She is counting the days. We even see her describe her life this way: that year-long cycle of legal appointments, deadlines, and holidays that structure her fight for Robert’s parole. Which is to say, her life. 

Obviously, the film’s name is not arbitrary. But part of the power of Time is in the range of meanings it manages to generate, in an attentive viewer’s mind, over the course of its runtime. The title verges on ironic. Time, by definition, is progress: It hurtles only forward, with no off-ramps or exits, no alternatives, no take-backs. It is only appropriate for Bradley to treat this definition like a rule worth breaking. Because time’s role in our lives is, ultimately, something like a seventh sense. It is that fundamental to our perspective of the shape and span of our lives, so much so that we can’t help but claim, in our language, that it’s ours. We say it can be given, stolen, borrowed, managed, wasted. Bradley’s portrait is a blistering and compassionate reminder that for the incarcerated and their loved ones, time is not something you have, but something you do. It isn’t progress. It’s punishment. To “do time” is to lose it. 

It’s essential, then, that Bradley’s documentary attends so carefully to our sensations as we watch, swelling and swerving its way through this family’s long haul of an emotional ordeal. It’s vital, and also sort of impossible, that the movie climaxes and closes on the most startlingly intimate of notes. I’ll leave the raw details to the movie to reveal. But you can’t miss it. There’s a brief moment, in a car — the suggestion of an incident — which, among other things, reveals the level of trust and compassion flowing between the director and the Richardson family, and gets to the root of what it means to let an artist into one’s life, to say nothing of how it feels to see a life restored. 

Bradley’s own sleight of hand comes soon after, and it is all the more extraordinary for being so simple. She finds a way to recast what came before, building toward a final image that is deeply, knowingly bittersweet. Time, Bradley asks us to remember, is what we lose. Only in a movie can we entertain and engineer the fantasy of getting it back, rewinding the clock, restoring presence to a loved one’s absence. Thank God, then, for movies. This one especially.

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Film Review: ‘Time’ a terrific look at the pull of loss

This image released by Amazon Studios shows a scene from “Time.” (Amazon Studios via AP)

This image released by Amazon Studios shows Sibil Fox Richardson, left, and her husband Robert in a scene from “Time.” (Amazon Studios via AP)

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There is a scene in the documentary “Time” that captures a woman on the phone trying to speak to a judge’s clerk. She’s put on hold. Nothing happens as the seconds tick away. One minute becomes two. The woman is still, waiting patiently. Eventually, she gets through but the call comes to nothing.

Most filmmakers would leave that tedious moment on the cutting room floor, but not director Garrett Bradley, who is making her first nonfiction feature. Her film is precisely about wasted time. “Time” is a story about loss and patience and an unjust system that demands both.

The woman on the phone is Sibil Fox Richardson and she’s trying to get her husband released from prison while also raising six boys. “Time” is her story, augmented by video diary entries she made for her husband, locked up in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Bradley weaves these incredibly intimate videos with her own footage of Richardson and her family, always unrushed. A young son is seen sleeping or putting on socks. The slow pan out from a grandmother’s face. A son simply eating. People chatting before an event. All while a lazy piano plays.

“Time” had its world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where Bradley was awarded best director for U.S. documentary, becoming the first Black woman to win that prize. “Time” deserves every award it gets: It is terrific filmmaking, augmented by the woman at its center, a formidable and charismatic figure.

Richardson and her husband, Robert, both spent time for the attempted armed robbery of a credit union to help keep their urban clothes store afloat. No money was stolen and the culprits were all first-time offenders. She served three years; her husband got a 60-year sentence in 1999.

This black and white film is not about guilt or innocence. It’s about the cost one family has had to bear. Richardson was pregnant with twins when their father was locked up; the film captures them on the cusp of turning 18. “They have no idea what fathers even do,” she says.

The filmmakers go back and forth in time, juxtaposing images of 20 years ago with recent footage. Toddlers become men, men go back to kindergartners. There is always something missing — a husband and a father.

“Time is when you look at pictures of when your babies were small. And then you look at them and you see that they have mustaches and beards,” Richardson says. “And that the biggest hope that you have was that before they turned into men, that they would have a chance to be with their father.”

The personal gets political as Richardson argues that the national prison system is just a modern form of slavery. “Listen, my story is the story of over 2 million people in the United States of America,” she says. She becomes an advocate and a dynamite public speaker. But above all, there is love, an unwavering, fierce love for a man she can only visit twice a month.

Among the interesting things about Bradley’s approach is the film’s color palette. She has chosen to strip the home movies of color and present her own modern footage in the same monochrome, giving the different parts of the film a knitted smoothness and timelessness, a wheel that keeps spinning.

The last few moments contain some of the most exhilarating and moving moments ever committed to film and Bradley’s reversing of video images — ending with a kiss — is simply gorgeous, poetic filmmaking. “Time” is very much worth everyone’s time.

“Time,” an Amazon Studios release, is rated PG-13 for language and adult situations. Running time: 81 minutes. Four stars out of four.

MPAA Definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

Online: https://amzn.to/34kxpwE

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Review: ‘Time,’ a wrenching story of love and injustice, is one of 2020’s great documentaries

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The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials .

The opening sequence of “Time,” Garrett Bradley’s haunting, heartrending documentary, is a nearly six-minute masterpiece in miniature. It’s a montage of home-video snippets, shot over several years by Sibil Fox Richardson, who goes by Fox Rich. We first see her aiming the camera at herself and trying to figure out the best angle — the first of many moments in which she’ll gently assert her authorship, framing and reframing her own image. She speaks of her husband, Robert Richardson, who’s in prison, noting she herself was released about a week earlier. Moving on to a happier subject, she announces she’s pregnant with twins, standing up to reveal her gently swollen belly.

Before she can say much more, one of her young sons, Laurence, pops into the frame with a goofy grin — and for the next few minutes the camera is giddily aloft, leaping from one scene to the next, in what almost feels like a single uninterrupted movement. Piano chords flood the soundtrack, and images flood the screen: We see Rich hanging out with her boys at home, splashing about with them in a pool, lecturing them in the car and jostling next to them on a carnival ride. Eventually she addresses the camera again, quietly beaming: “Do you see this smile, Robert?” she whispers. “Do you know how hard I’m gonna be smiling when you come home?”

It’s an intensely intimate sequence, teeming with life, pulsing with joy and yet marked by a powerful, palpable absence. Rich filmed these moments so that her husband could see a little of what he’d missed after his eventual release. Many years later, she turned over her roughly 100-hour trove of material to Bradley, who had already been filming Rich and her six sons (including those now fully grown twins, Freedom and Justus). Bradley and her editor, Gabriel Rhodes, began cutting together the past and present footage and what emerged was a prismatic story of crime and punishment, a critical portrait of the prison system’s many casualties and an 81-minute, two-decades-spanning epic of love, devotion and perseverance.

“Time,” which opens in select theaters this week and begins streaming Oct. 16 on Amazon, is an artful puzzle, a hypnotic game of chronological hopscotch. But as constructed by Bradley, who won a directing prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival , it’s bound by certain formal unities. Despite the clear contrast between the rough-hewn archival video and the sharp, shimmeringly beautiful newer material (shot by Zac Manuel, Justin Zweifach and Nisa East), the entire movie is rendered in black and white. It’s a visual choice that allows both time frames to gently blur while still remaining distinct, even as they are often tied together by the melancholy strains and surging arpeggios of Jamieson Shaw and Edwin Montgomery’s score.

Most of all, perhaps, “Time” is held together by Rich’s remarkable voice — soft and raspy in the older clips, deeper and more declarative in the more recent ones. It’s clear from the outset that she’s a born storyteller. She tells us how she and Robert fell in love as teenagers, married in 1997 and hoped to open a hip-hop clothing store in Shreveport, La. When their plans fell through, they committed a foolish, desperate act and tried to rob a credit union. Rich, who drove the getaway car, received a plea deal and served three-and-a-half years. Robert was convicted and sentenced to 60 years in prison, a staggering sentence for a robbery in which no one was hurt. (The story of Robert’s nephew, who also participated in the crime, goes untold here.)

“Sixty years … of human life,” an older Rich murmurs, with more disbelief than self-pity. By this point her husband has served 20 years of that sentence, and she’s spent a lot of time petitioning for his release, filing appeals and making endless phone calls on his behalf. She’s also given lectures about her family’s experience and the injustices of a carceral state in which Black people are grotesquely overrepresented, which she and others liken to a modern-day reconstitution of slavery. Rich and her children might not be behind bars but as long as Robert is, they are not, in any meaningful sense, free.

And the devastating loss they feel is somehow made more acute, rather than less, by the very real counterpresence of joy, success and fulfillment in their lives. “Time” is a patchwork of moments big and small: We see Freedom speaking in a political science debate, Justus impressing his mom with some of his college French and their older brother Remington graduating from dental school. Most of all, we see Rich gradually (though not always chronologically) coming into her own, whether she’s publicly reckoning with her long-ago crime at church, taping a TV commercial for the car dealership she now runs or speaking publicly about the pain of growing older without her husband — and seeing her boys grow up without their father.

Rich rarely looks more radiant than she does in those speeches, partly because we can see the effect of her words on her listeners — most of them other Black women held rapt by her intensity of feeling — and partly because of the unapologetic glamour with which she’s presented. That glamour suffuses nearly all the recent footage, bringing an intense, almost sacralizing beauty to bear on simple deeds and gestures: a young man ironing a shirt, a woman steeling herself for another dispiriting phone call. Some of these images recur steadily throughout, as if to remind us of the repetition that comes with waiting, the ritualistic despair that seeps into every moment.

The saddest recurring image is a silent God’s-eye view of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which is as close as we get to seeing Robert during his incarceration, apart from the life-sized cardboard cutout of him that graces the Richardsons’ walls. His absence quietly haunts the movie even as it builds toward a moment of such shattering emotional force that the screen can hardly contain it; it all but ruptures the surface of a movie that is already a record in fragments. “Time” can make you weep for a hundred reasons, from joy, pain or recognition, but its wounds and its glories are finally inextricable from one of the paradoxes of moviemaking itself. Cinema can magically compress decades into hours and transform lives into narratives, but what it erects here is ultimately a monument to something irretrievable. Cherish every moment of this movie, because each one stands in for all the others that have been lost.

Rated: PG-13, for some strong language Running time: 1 hour, 21 minutes Playing: Starts Oct. 9 Landmark Hillcrest, San Diego; in limited release where theaters are open; available Oct. 16 on Amazon Prime Video

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Sweet time travel romcom with strong language, some sex.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

A man who is given the gift of time learns that it

The main character is a genuinely nice fellow. He

A character gets into a drunk driving accident tha

The movie has no nudity, but characters definitely

Language is very strong, despite the film's sweet

The main character's sister has a drinking problem

Parents need to know that About Time is a sweet comic romance with a time travel element that shows characters with strong family ties, who are interested in settling down and raising new families. Though there's no nudity, sex is an issue; characters often talk about or think about sex, and we see couples in…

Positive Messages

A man who is given the gift of time learns that it is precious, and that every moment spent with his loved ones counts. Love, family, and loyalty are all strong themes throughout. The idea that one can find beauty in the small moments of every day is reinforced.

Positive Role Models

The main character is a genuinely nice fellow. He rarely abuses his time travel powers, and when he does it's in a sweet, funny way rather than in any way that hurts others. He is devoted to his family and demonstrates commitment to those he is closest to.

Violence & Scariness

A character gets into a drunk driving accident that is not graphic. She is seen in the hospital with some scratches and bruises. It is also alluded to that her boyfriend may be abusive toward her, but nothing definitive is said or shown. Some angry arguments and a few comic punches.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

The movie has no nudity, but characters definitely think about and talk about sex. The main character spends a summer obsessing over a pretty houseguest and hoping to sleep with her. He later meets the girl of his dreams on a date, and uses his time travel gift to have sex with her several times in one night though only a bit of kissing and the humorous aftermath is visible. He also kisses a girl at a New Year's Eve party. A woman's naked breasts are visible in a photo art exhibit.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language is very strong, despite the film's sweet nature. "F--k" is heard several times, as well as "s--t," and this phrase: "oh my assing God." A middle finger gesture is shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

The main character's sister has a drinking problem that she overcomes. She is also said to be living with an abusive boyfriend who also has a drinking problem. She leaves that relationship and takes up with a nice guy. Otherwise, characters generally drink socially throughout the film, such as at dinner or at a New Year's Eve party.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that About Time is a sweet comic romance with a time travel element that shows characters with strong family ties, who are interested in settling down and raising new families. Though there's no nudity, sex is an issue; characters often talk about or think about sex, and we see couples in bed after presumed sex. Language is also fairly strong, with several uses of "f--k," some uses of "s--t," and one use of this phrase: "oh my assing God." The main character's sister is described as being in an abusive relationship and has a drinking problem. She gets into a drunk driving accident, and is shown in the hospital with some scratches and bruises. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (9)
• Kids say (20)

Based on 9 parent reviews

Some of the tropes it leans on don't work well

What's the story.

After turning 21, Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) has a discussion with his father ( Bill Nighy ) and learns that he has the ability to travel through time to any point in his own life. He spends a summer learning to use his gift and fails to win his summer crush, a pretty blonde houseguest. One night, he meets Mary ( Rachel McAdams ) and falls in love. Unfortunately, he learns that by changing other events that happened that night, he hasn't actually met her yet. So he must re-meet Mary and win her again. More complications arise when he learns that his time traveling affects his children. But as his time destinations become more limited, he begins learning deeper and more profound lessons about life.

Is It Any Good?

This is a low-key and heartwarming entertainment. One of our finest comedy writers, Richard Curtis worked on beloved British TV shows like Mr. Bean and Black Adder before making a splash in movies with Four Weddings and a Funeral , Notting Hill , and Bridget Jones's Diary . His directorial debut was the wonderful Love Actually . But as he continued directing, it became clear that he did not grasp brevity; all of his films run over two hours. Moreover, in addition to being precious about his material, Curtis has also become precious about his characters; nobody in ABOUT TIME is really tested in any serious way. The movie goes easy on them. But aside from that, the characters are really loveable and their relationships are delightfully old-fashioned and touching. Bill Nighy in particular gives a wonderful performance. Neither the father-son story nor the love story is given more weight, and the time travel aspect never takes over. (It's also refreshingly free of visual effects.)

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the movie's attitude toward sex . Do characters seem more interested in casual sex or in establishing deeper connections? How does this message differ from traditional Hollywood movies?

What would you do if you had time travel powers like Tim's? Would you help others?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the family relationships in the movie? How are we supposed to feel about the family?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 1, 2013
• On DVD or streaming : February 4, 2014
• Cast : Bill Nighy , Domhnall Gleeson , Rachel McAdams
• Director : Richard Curtis
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Romance
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Brothers and Sisters
• Run time : 123 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language and some sexual content
• Last updated : May 2, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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The Cannes selection is a haunting but ultimately life-affirming chronicle of the early days of lockdown.

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Nostalgic docufiction that morphs into a lockdown thriller, Lou Ye ‘s “ An Unfinished Film ” is the second work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (alongside Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides”) in which a “Sixth Generation” Chinese filmmaker has repurposed their old films to create something new. The line between reality and drama blurs as Lou genuinely re-discovers years-old footage, and proceeds to follow a fictitious film crew completing an abandoned project, only for China’s severe Covid-19 lockdowns to interrupt their work, as well as life in all its rhythms.

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As the initial seconds and minutes of this ordeal turn to hours and days, the movie’s fabric evolves in tandem. While the documentary cameras — once acknowledged, but now invisible — remain neutral observers, the frame shifts and contorts to accommodate footage from phone screens and webcams, as these become the safest (and only possible) avenues to communicate. There’s a roughness to sound design as well, which captures the delay in responses as lines of dialogue are heard on both ends of a given conversation (spoken, and on speaker phone), as though “An Unfinished Film” were being live-streamed from some still-unfolding disaster, and the characters were growing further out of sync.

The days turn to hours, which turn to weeks. Life and society begin to transform, with new rituals the cast and crew film from their hotel windows, along with new dangers they observe, as information is kept from them (real viral videos about whistleblowers are also featured). As they slowly find new ways to stay sane and keep themselves entertained, this leads to an upbeat, multi-screen montage set to an acoustic cover of Mongolian-Chinese pop hit “The Fiery Sarlang” — among the festival’s most moving, life-affirming musical moments.

By entwining reality with dramatization to such an inseparable degree, “An Unfinished Film” runs the emotional gamut, with a pulsing naturalism that few films about the recent pandemic (or any real disasters) have ever managed to achieve. In the process, Lou crafts not only a character drama in which crew members play and film themselves — an inadvertent ode to the filmmaking process — but an intimate chronicle of suffering and collective resilience too, as people adapt to new and unfamiliar ways of being, and of seeing the world around them.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Special Screenings), May 17, 2024. Running time: 106 MIN.

• Production: (Singapore-Germany) A Yingfilms Pte. Ltd., Essential Films production. (World sales: Coproduction Office, Paris.) Producers: Philippe Bober, Yingli Ma.
• Crew: Director: Lou Ye. Writers: Lou Ye, Yingli Ma. Camera: Jian Zeng. Editing: Jiaming Tian.
• With: Qin Hao, Mao Xiaorui, Qi Xi, Huang Xuan, Liang Ming, Zhang Songwen, Youyou. (Chinese dialogue)

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Beautifully filmed and unabashedly sincere, About Time finds director Richard Curtis at his most sentimental.

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Colin Burgess is having a bit of a moment with the buzzy success of the micro-indie “Dad & Step-Dad” and this week’s release of the truly funny and clever “Free Time,” a movie that uses Burgess’ on-screen energy perfectly. Ryan Martin Brown’s film jumps into the oft-visited waters of the quarter-life crisis but it does so with its own comic voice, one that produces laughs in the very first scene and doesn’t really let up for this film’s tight 78-minute runtime. This is one of the better indie comedies in a long time, enjoyable from minute one until the final frame, and deceptively insightful about the structure of the modern world, one that encourages us to do more with our free time but doesn’t offer much guidance to what exactly we should be doing. 

In the phenomenal opening scene, Drew (Burgess) goes to his superior at his job to express his dissatisfaction with being more of a data entry employee than a data analysis one. What starts as a conversation that feels like it will lead to a new position or maybe even a promotion ends with Drew quitting on the spot, aggravating his boss by leaving him without an employee. Drew takes his stuff and goes back to the apartment he shares with a clickbait-writing roommate, having no idea what he’s going to do next.

Drew’s efforts to figure out that last part is the driving narrative force of “Free Time.” He quickly realizes that his friends have lives that include jobs, leaving him little to do during the day—a bit where his roommate’s girlfriend yells at him for how often he’s watched the same movie on DVD (this time with commentary) is excellent. As he faces more people in his life who are stunned that he quit a good job in this economic climate, Drew starts to realize that he made a mistake. When the band he’s in shifts focus to country, leaving Drew’s keyboard playing behind, it’s another blow.

From art to fiction to motivational speakers, we’re constantly told to make the most of our free time, but what exactly are people like Drew supposed to do with all that freedom? How do you make your dreams come true when you don't really have interesting dreams? Some of the direction is a little too loose, and the non-stop piano score grows a little grating, but Brown’s script is wonderfully natural and organic, allowing Burgess to drift through the film in a way that’s consistently fascinating. Whether he’s completely blowing a potential hook-up ( Jessie Pinnick , so great in “ Princess Cyd ”) or aggressively trying to get his job back, Burgess is perfect here, never leaning too hard into what could have been a really mannered performance. We all know guys like Drew. We may have even been guys like Drew.

“Free Time” is a funny character study for about an hour before it becomes something even more remarkable that I couldn’t possibly spoil. Suffice to say, this movie has some surprises up its sleeves, and they unfold in a way that really drives home the theme that free time can be more emotionally costly than we’ve been led to believe.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Free Time (2024)

Colin Burgess as Drew

Rajat Suresh as Rajat

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‘the falling sky’ review: a vivid portrait of an indigenous people’s urgent fight for survival.

Premiering in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, the documentary spends time with the Yanomami people of the northern Amazon as they prepare for a sacred ritual and monitor the incursions of illegal miners.

By Sheri Linden

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Senior Copy Editor/Film Critic

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If you’re expecting to ride out the apocalypse in a deluxe bunker , you might want to consider the visionary wisdom of Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, a central figure in The Falling Sky . “When the earth transforms,” he says at one point in the documentary , “you can have all the money you want. You can run away with the money, but when the stormy winds come, you won’t be able to silence them.”

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Inspired by a book of the same name by Kopenawa and anthropologist Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky ( Hutomosi Kerayuwi in Yanomami, A Quedo Do Céu in Portuguese) is, like a couple of other recent films about Indigenous people in Brazil, The Territory and The Buriti Flower , the result of a collaborative effort with its subjects. The filmmakers’ access to Kopenawa and his Watoriki community, the result of ongoing involvement and established relationships, yields a vibrant insider’s perspective. Accomplished documentarian Eryk Rocha ( Cinema Novo ) and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, an artist and researcher at the helm of her first feature-length film, take a mostly vérité approach, with a few well-deployed stylistic flourishes and excerpts from other films. They bring the viewer inside the villagers’ reahu rites for Kopenawa’s deceased father-in-law, his mentor in the ways of shamanism, leadership and defense of the forest.

The urgency that propels the doc is that of a non-warring people fighting the good fight. Via radio, groups within the territory keep one another apprised of the approach of devious gold miners, and exchange updates on children who have fallen ill to the various illnesses (malaria, coronavirus) that the outsiders bring into the region. Hundreds of children have died so far. With history as their guide, women worry that there will be rapes and murders at the hands of the interlopers.

Along with the radio conversations, on-camera interviews and voiceover commentary, mainly from Kopenawa, the film offers an impressionistic sense of the encroaching miners: the smoke and popping sounds from their fires. Led by Rocha and Bernard Machado, with additional camerawork by Morzaniel Iramari and Roseane Yariana, the cinematography moves fluidly between long views that take in the green of the countryside, group interactions and the unhurried fullness of the night sky, and up-close communion with the reahu , from preparation through ritual. Peeling bananas by the bushel for huge pots of puree, older men, smiling and joking, work by flashlight and worry that they’re missing the good part of the feast. In daytime, younger men engage in ferocious warlike dances and combative ceremonial dialogues that spark more commentary from the smiling oldsters. Kopenawa explains a few core aspects of the rituals, but otherwise the helmers let the specifics of the reahu speak for themselves.

The gold miners’ numbers now approach those of the roughly 30,000 Yanomami. But unlike the Amazonian tribe, the miners and their ruinous power are backed by “even bigger destroyers,” as Kopenawa puts is. And this, of course, is where those of us who aren’t bunker-building billionaires can identify, inextricably connected as we all are by the ever-expanding power of mega-conglomerates and the governments that serve them. In ways that are cinematic and incisively poetic, Kopenawa and the writer-directors let the dots naturally connect. How far of a leap is it from the predatory practices that strip land of ore, clear-cut it for agribusiness, let chemical runoff poison waters and cause disease and hunger and death, to the profiteering coalition of industry and government that’s devoted to bombs and other weapons of mass destruction while insisting, as Kopenawa points out, that Indigenous people trying to live in peace are the savages? Is it a leap at all?

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Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1

Chronicles a multi-faceted, 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west. Chronicles a multi-faceted, 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west. Chronicles a multi-faceted, 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west.

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The 2024 Festival Films You Need to Know

• When will Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 be released? Powered by Alexa
• June 28, 2024 (United States)
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• $100,000,000 (estimated)

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• Runtime 3 hours 1 minute
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