Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

pocketg99 That's really all there is to it. This film is raw. This film will tear into you. More than just emotional, this film is magnetic. What is it really? A simple film; a simple subject. This movie is put together with simple style. It's mostly interviews and mostly hand-held, and yet somehow it eclipses so many more complex and more expensive movies when it comes to emotion. Like I said, this film is magnetic. It is not a movie that you have to work yourself up to watch. Sit down, press play, and this thing will take you. This is the sort of movie that makes you pay attention to it and once you pay attention to it, there's no escaping its impact. More so than any thriller, this is a movie that you can't look away from. Even if you already know how it will end, this film will affect you. At the end of the day, there must just be something to seeing someone look you in the eye, and pour their heart out. That's what this movie is all about.

chaos-rampant I came to this expecting something more or less gratuitous, a ghastly backwoods crime along with some lurid mystery. It does open with the mangled bodies of children discovered by Arkansas police in the woods and we go on to experience the baleful place that surrounds this crime, ruled by a vengeful god.But centered on the trial that follows I was surprised to see something else, entirely more revealing about a larger ignorance and worthy of Herzog as a study on delusion.The events are troubling. Three kids were horribly murdered, three kids were arrested for it, based on dubious testimony from one of the kids; an undocumented 12 hour interrogation, questions guiding answers, a frightened kid susceptible to suggestion.The rest of the evidence is not much better, from circumstantial to ridiculous. A knife dug out near someone's home, pentagrams found on a book about Wicca, tied to that hysterical malarkey about satanic murders then sweeping the media.What we have plain and simple is a case of miscarried justice unfolding before our eyes in that courtroom. This is not to say (from just having seen a film) that the kids definitely didn't do it, we would be as dogmatic as the redneck prosecutors then, but that we are far and away from any certainty.It's basically a modern day witch hunt that we see, I mean, if you ever wanted to see how these things happened, it's right here, and this is 20 years ago in a first world country. It's also direct insight of how that hysteria with satanic cults started and was kept going.But it's the larger ignorance at play that fascinates me. The baleful ire of parents is understandable I guess. But how dismaying to see a fuddy daddy in his 60s with a mailorder diploma brought on to testify as "expert on the occult"? What are we to make of juvenile witnesses who come out to testify that the kids confessed to them? Or how the prosecution just presses on to get a conviction, acting like the matter is clear cut and simply comes down to evil, just because it says in their job description that they have to prosecute?So even more chilling than kids who can be grabbed and senselessly murdered in the woods just like that is the realization that lives can hinge on such ignorant storytelling, because this is meant to be the mechanism that restores clarity, and instead we have this dogmatic insistence on using stories to explain a reality that is complex, elusive and often beyond certainty. This is an even more blind ignorance, because it thinks of itself as justice and reason and doesn't need to hide its irrationality out in the woods but can take place in a courtroom in broad daylight with us watching.You'll see this in the film itself. The filmmakers cast an accusing glance on a step-father, why, because he acts weird.

MisterWhiplash To begin with, at first when Metallica's opening chords for their great song 'Welcome Home (Sanitarium)' came up at the start of the movie - as the bodies of the three children being pulled from the site where they were discovered in the Robin Hood woods - I was taken aback. It seems a little much to put that music to these images, probably images that would work best without any music or a different theme. But it becomes clearer why this is used - there's an ominous, dark tone that the filmmakers (one of whom, Joe Berlinger, would go on to make a Metallica documentary), Metallica actually does the music for the movie (all those metal-music moments are them), and for Damien Echols this was the song that made his situation remind him of the most: being stuck in a place where time stands still, no one leaves and no one will (as the song goes). Paradise Lost is the story of an insane situation, for both the parents of the victims (who think and/or know these teenagers are guilty, even before any facts are presented) and for the teenagers themselves (one of them is a 72 IQ).It would be one thing though if the film were just a true crime story, or a story of justice - or, it should be said injustice, since it's a thing that, perhaps after the fact or in hindsight one knows in 2016 the convicted killers were pardoned in 2011 after so much evidence that was tainted or botched and so on was revealed - but it's also a story of a particular place. West Memphis, Arkansas and its people are like another character, and the directors get some compelling footage and images from this part of the country where everything is just flat in the landscape sense, it looks the same at Christmas time as it does in the summer (it's kind of jarring to see all those decorations up with everything seeming to look the same), and Church is with a capital 'C' and many attend in order to ward off Satan. One of those is Mark Byers, a man who has quite a singing voice in Church and a helluva way with a pistol outside of it; see the scene where he talks about using the teenagers to shoot at with a pumpkin as his target.It's easy to see at first why tempers and passions would be so heated: three young children killed but more to that, mutilated (some of the details are sickening), and left in such a way that brings up the occult. One of the things that makes this movie stick out, to a point where it's difficult to say that the filmmakers aren't balanced, is that they show the parents of the kids as much as the killers on trial - prosecution and defense get fairly equal time on camera, albeit as the trial goes along further for Baldwin and Echols the evidence points more to not guilty than guilt. Even if one watches it today and knows the outcomes of the trial (and what happened years later) there's so much compelling information and testimony and characterizations to go on; how Echols is on the stand; how Byers changes from one place (church, shooting at a pumpkin) to another (on the stand, with a brain tumor that may or may not be there); teenage girls who won't be on camera, leaving the filmmakers to get creative with their coverage; the families and people watching who can't take it; a moment with Echols and his baby in the courtroom.The film is long at 2 1/2 hours, but it never feels it, and the movement from one point in the case to the next becomes more disheartening as it goes along. The first part where Misskelley has his separate trial is hard enough to take (that involved the confession that was false) and is heartbreaking to watch; the second part is where the details in the case gain traction - this piece doesn't fit here, the reasonable doubt there, what happened with this piece of evidence that was *lost* - and in a way knowing the outcome makes it all the more tragic and captivating. I wish I had been there at the time to see this without knowing the results, and perhaps it would have made for a different viewing experience. As it is, Paradise Lost captures not just a court case or grisly murder, but a set of feelings and emotions in the air in that place and time: rage, confusion, desperation, fear and disillusionment with the public and law enforcement and so on. It has staying power past being a typical, dark-envelope-pushing HBO documentary.

MindGem First of all, the rating should be on the film and not anything specific it contains right so for that reason I give this one the lowest possible because it's a classic case of a bias idiotic perspective they view this case. Documentaries today is about twisting the truth rather than exposing it, the world is upside-down.So I'm 100% sure that these psycho teens committed the crime.Their defense was so apathetic, what teenager wouldn't cry, rage and just panic over the possibility of being convicted for murder if they had nothing to do with it. The one guy, the one with the black shark eyes even smirk, waves and seem a bit proud at times in and around the court room. The retard gave a statement where he confessed the crime and goes into details on what they did. This is the thing the film makers and the conspirators claim to be a false testament meaning that the police either force him to confess or that the police interrogate in such a way that the suspect are manipulated or tricked into confessing the crime. But why would this be even remotely plausible if the police on the tape question again and again about details if they police had planted the statement they wanted the suspect to say.Like "at what time did you come there" -"at 7 or 8", "before you said around 9" - "yea, around 9" , "so which is it, 7 or 8 or 9", "-8 or 9" and it goes on like this. Say that the police had their estimated time frame for the murder at 8. Why would he Not stop asking when he said 8 but instead ask again and again like a honest cop asking to get a straight answer would. No no no! His statement was real. Guilty!You should instead question these film makers and those crazy nuts giving the murderers such support on at best equally unfounded evidence that they were innocent. The women that fall in love with killers is a classic too, do you really believe this broad is the exception?Hell no, these guys planned to kill and killed these children.