Critic Reviews

The strength of “Who Killed Garrett Phillips?” isn’t just about what’s on screen but how it got there, i.e., the assembling of parts—audio, video, interviews, testimony. These are allowed to speak for themselves. ... Three hours of riveting television.

Filmmaker Liz Garbus’s “Who Killed Garrett Phillips?” meticulously and even masterfully brings its viewers to this very place of angry exasperation, laying out the narrative details of a botched murder investigation that some of us might have been vaguely aware of, if at all. ... Ambiguity is not a flaw here; in fact, it’s what makes this story so compelling, so infuriating and so sad.

At its best, it reminded me of the landmark HBO docuseries “Paradise Lost” or the remarkable “The Staircase” in its level of detail and how it captures how people make the kind of drastic mistakes that allow the answers to get further and further out of reach.

Garbus gives a strong close to this three-week series of format experimentation. You may not come away from Who Killed Garrett Phillips? with a clear answer on the title question or with any one single and specific judicial impropriety. You'll just have plenty to ponder and argue about.

Oscar-winning director Liz Garbus plays it straight, leaning on recorded telephone traffic and lengthy video excerpts from questionable interrogations.