The Sentence

The Sentence is the beginning of a conversation that needs to continue.

What unnecessary imprisonment does to families is often written about in abstract terms, but to see what it did to one specific family runs an emotional gamut that the patience of this heroically committed filmmaker does full justice to.

By making you feel deeply for his sister and her children, Valdez has fashioned his film to make the lapses less glaring.

Here's a true surprise in 2018: a documentary about an American injustice that will likely leave you, by its end, blubbering tears of relieved joy.

The subject is inherently engrossing, but a better documentary could (and probably will) be made about it.

The Sentence is so committed to its concentration on emotion and heart that it's difficult not to get carried away and it feels almost churlish to quibble with the intellectual responses it barely aspires to.

At some point during the documentary, the story of a family tragedy begins to find its activism tone, and Rudy's work to document Cindy's life... begins to be drawn as a universal story, which can change lives. [Full review in Spanish]

This is not that film. It's an intimate, small-scale portrait of how a profoundly unintelligent policy impacted one family.

We know that the camera isn't being held by a stranger but a beloved uncle, which imbues each exchange with not only affection but also an irreproducible immediacy.

The project is as painful as it is straightforward.

Indicts the mandatory minimum-sentence system not through accumulating facts but by showing its traumatic toll on [the director's] family.

...The Sentence is one of the most powerful documentaries of 2018.