Reviews

The stories in "The Interrupters," a hard wallop of a documentary, may weigh heavily on your heart and head, but they will also probably infuriate you. When a frail-looking child with startled eyes breaks down crying, her tiny hands covering her tiny face as she talks about a neighborhood shooting, it's hard not to want to gather her up in your arms. It's also difficult not to feel outrage along with a sense of confused, familiar helplessness because this child lives in that war-torn part of the world called Chicago.

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There is a long tradition of what has been described as victim documentaries, nonfiction movies in which filmmakers train their cameras at people enduring crushing hardships. At their worst these documentaries exploit the suffering of others, turning their pain into consumable spectacles. "The Interrupters" evades that trap partly because it doesn't try to sell a happy, easily digestible story and partly because it digs in. It took 14 or so months to shoot and clocks in at two absorbing hours (down from its original 162 minutes). Mostly, though, it rises above the usual do-gooder cant by giving the interrupters — and the people they work among and periodically come close to dying for — the time to share their stories about life in the trenches. Mr. James has put a face to a raging epidemic and an unforgivable American tragedy.

By Manohla Dargis, from The New York Times

A surprisingly moving documentary collaboration between producer-director Steve James and producer Alex Kotlowitz, "The Interrupters" paradoxically succeeds because it refuses to soften reality. A look at people trying at the ground level to stop street violence in Chicago, it tears at your heart with its depiction of the intractability of the problem. But it simultaneously insists, and makes you believe, that change is possible one person at a time.

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As with "Hoop Dreams," filming people over time leads to some surprising results, but "The Interrupters" is too honest a film to pretend that all situations end with tidy resolutions. If there is a message here, especially as regards the young people who are the focus of CeaseFire's efforts, it's summed up in the title of the Solomon Burke song that plays over the closing credits: "Don't Give Up on Me." This film not only asks that of us, it shows us why we should care.

By Kenneth Turan, from Los Angeles Times

So don't see "The Interrupters" out of some grudging civic duty. See it for the beautiful and horrifying people, for the despair and the against-all-odds uplift. Hardiman stresses that CeaseFire doesn't talk religion but it does work to save lives. For ordinary moviegoers in search of an enthralling experience, that work and this film are heroically life-affirming.

By Richard Corliss, from Time