The Staircase

The eight-part feature, which aired on the Sundance Channel in 2005, is absolutely gripping and illustrates just how powerful documentary filmmaking can be.

Lestrade’s cameras pull us farther into the legal system than Law & Order or Court TV ever could, and the result is chilling.

It's a splendid piece of cinema-verite storytelling, fascinating, thought-provoking and dramatically clear, and no less popcorn-compelling for being leisurely and long.

It may seem ludicrous to say that a movie running more than six hours is well edited, but The Staircase, by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, is. And not only is the editing prize-worthy, but the whole film is also so brilliantly conceived, reported, filmed and paced that you may come to wish it were twice as long.

The Staircase is the scariest portrait of criminal justice since the nonfiction film that helped launch the modern innocence movement, Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line. It’s scarier, in fact, because The Staircase isn’t based on re-creations but on original footage, a front-row view of legal truth as it’s feathered into existence, manufactured from guesses and conjecture, and sold to a jury as more or less believable fiction.

There's a surprising amount of humor in the series, as when a sassy male prostitute admits in court that his client base included many professionals, including attorneys and at least one judge, but the series' power, gravity, and urgency come because viewers are never allowed to forget that a man's life and a family's future is at stake.

It’s that rare long documentary about a tabloid crime that becomes a deep exploration of death, the justice system, and the very process of making a documentary film.