TIME ****

 This astonishing documentary, with footage taken over two decades, is essentially a video diary in which Fox Rich fights to have her husband released from prison where he is serving a 60 year sentence for armed robbery but, as the title "Time" attests, it also deals with the time that passes from the opening home movie shots of a young Fox Rich and her family to the present day where we discover that Fox has had a successful life and runs her own business as well as successfully raising a large family. Of course, this hasn't stopped her continuing the fight on her husband's behalf but using her success to her and her husband's best advantage.

It's structured like a fiction film in which every moment is real and it's as gripping as any Michael Mann thriller and it's so magnificently shot, (in black and white by Nisa East, Zac Manuel and Justin Zweifach), and edited, (by Gabriel Rhodes), it almost takes a suspension of disbelief to realise that everything we are seeing is real. This is one of the great documentaries, (the director is Garrett Bradley), mainly because it subverts the documentary genre. This is no 'bleeding hearts' portrait of despair, (Fox and her husband really did carry out the robbery), but the study of a powerful woman doing what she can to fight a system rigged against her.

If this were fiction it would probably be an Oscar-bait vehicle for Viola Davis but you know that no-one, least of all Fox herself, is acting and yet she is giving a performance, performing in the hope that everything she says and does will get her husband Rob paroled and as we follow her on her journey we also follow her sons on theirs. As a study in resilience and what is possible this is amazing and deeply moving. It's a demonstration of what I would call 'pure cinema' where the only dramatic effects come from the material itself; a masterpiece.