Critic Reviews

Brother's Keeper, the year's best documentary, has an impact and immediacy that most fiction films can only envy. It tells a strong story, and some passages are truly inspirational, as the neighbors of Munnsville become determined that Delbert will not be railroaded by some ambitious prosecutor more concerned with bringing charges than with understanding the reality of the situation.

Brother's Keeper has the texture, emotion and raw urgency of a Woody Guthrie anthem -- it keeps coming back to haunt you.

A documentary as compelling as the best whodunit.

Keeper is nonfiction in name only. Unabashedly subjective and dramaturgically conscious, it squeezes reality until the drama collects. Luckily for filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, this reality was juicy stuff.

Brother's Keeper is a thoroughly engaging examination of the whole curious affair by two New York City-based film makers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who document with a distinctive underlying humor and a feeling for contrasts between urban and rural America. Sometimes that contrast is touching, sometimes painfully hilarious, and often a little gloomy as the film delves into the lives of the surviving brothers to reveal a community with genuinely humane values, but one ripe for exploitation by the big city media. [16 Oct 1992, p.C4]

On par with the most compelling courtroom dramas, Brother's Keeper is all the more fascinating because it presents a reality as complex as any fictional plot could ever be. [20 Nov 1992, p.20]

Aided by a splendid, understated score, by Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, Brother's Keeper captures the story of how Munnsville saved Delbert from the slammer with probity and elegance. It also slyly suggests how the experience, even the presence of the documentary camera, socialized Delbert and his brothers. [26 Mar 1993, p.C2]

No, this offbeat story probably wouldn't make it on Matlock. But it does make for a gripping documentary about a particular way of life - and of death. [05 Jun 1993, p.E3]

A celebration of brotherly love in the form of a documentary about a possible mercy killing. It explores, with mercy and compassion, the paradoxes inherent to the concept of mercy killing, a crime of love rather than hate.

It's a rich slice of Americana that would seem to belong to an earlier, pre-television era, except that television comes to play a large part in Delbert's story. It's also about an aspect of life in rural America that's seldom seen by people who drive through it, and seldom if ever glimpsed in movies.