Parents' Guide to

Time

Movie PG-13 2020 81 minutes
Time Poster Image

Common Sense Media Review

Sandie Angulo Chen By Sandie Angulo Chen , based on child development research. How do we rate?

age 14+

Powerful, intense doc about wife's fight for her husband.

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This is an unforgettable documentary about one woman's fight to have her husband released early from an unfair prison sentence. Fox is painfully honest about the couple's crime; this isn't a film like Just Mercy about a wrongful conviction. What Fox wants people to know is that the same brokenness and systemic racism that led Just Mercy's Walter McMillian to sit on Death Row is responsible for all of the overly harsh sentencing that people of color, particularly Black men, still face in the United States' criminal courts. Fox is an absolutely compelling subject: She's so smart and so fiercely devoted to her husband and their sons, many of whom are in college and graduate school, flying in the face of statistics related to success rates for children of incarcerated adults.

Fox and director Bradley are clearly collaborators in the documentary, with Fox's personal home videos offering a lot to the story. There are a few questions that do go unanswered or unaddressed: How do Fox and Robert have such a young son if Robert has been incarcerated for so long, and what happened to the nephew involved in the robbery? The latter issue is particularly revelant, because there have to be extenuating circumstances related to why Rich isn't advocating for her nephew's early release. It's also somewhat underexplained how Fox ended up with such a relatively short sentence compared to Robert's, even if she was just the getaway driver. Those issues aside, there's so much to appreciate and reflect upon in Time, which will make viewers think not just about the time Robert served but the time he and his family have lost.

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