Popular reviews

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  Review by {Todd} ★★★★½

  "A picture can become a stereotype" - Narrator,

  - 2022 Ranked: boxd.it/eWNQo
  - Sundance 2022: boxd.it/f5MjG

  Innovative and brilliant.

  A lot has been said about police violence but few films do this good of a job identifying important transitions in police strategy and history that have brought us to where we are today. Archival documentaries, when done well, are informative but also make you feel like you've traveled through time. Riotsville USA brings history to life with it's provocative footage, fantastic editing, and thoughtful analysis. It's focus on the late 1960s and the Kerner commission report and subsequent militarization efforts is a sobering lesson on how power and fear almost always wins.

  A truly excellent documentary.

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  Review by Bilge Ebiri ★★★★

  An excellent (and ingenious) reworking of archival footage to present the story of American protest and American police repression as the story of two imaginary American cities. The somewhat poeticized narration was a bit much (and feels, at times, unnecessary), but it does bring everything together nicely at the end.

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  Review by Matt Neglia ★★★½

  RIOTSVILLE, USA solely uses extensive archival footage, primarily from the 1960s, to subconsciously draw painfully horrific parallels between the past & present. Institutional oppression is fully on display in Sierra Pettengill’s stirring & alarming documentary. A disturbingly cold watch.

  
  Sundance #17

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  Review by Ryland Walker Knight

  Pretty incredible feat, a superb argument about the propaganda machines at work, the theater we call news, the cruelty is the point as far back as we have been a country with guns and continued and exacerbated by money. Sierra even shows us the sponsorship for the RNC convention telling a story of fly swatting—and gassing. Horrific stuff! History isn’t done, and can be rewritten. And it should be, and here it is, kinda, using the tools of the supremacist state against same said source, contextualizing what wrongs are being fed to keep the fear machine chugging and white housewives armed against phantoms created by their husbands.

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★

  as damning an account of our country's (or our government's) propensity to violence as an answer as anything else I've seen, that it's culled from (absolutely incredible) archival footage makes it all the more potent -- an apt, anxious, companion to Medium Cool

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  Review by joshrowley ★★★★

  Chilling; educational; engaging; focused; frustrating; important; interesting; short; timely; well-made; well-narrated; well-paced.

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  Review by Ethan Johnson ★★★★½ 1

  “If 10 black people get together, they call it a riot. But 300 white people can get together, and they call it a convention.”

  Riotsville, USA (2022) is probably the best archival documentary I have ever seen. While it remains in a sphere of archival familiarity, it transcends those that have come before it through the creatively introspective narration and the factual text that guides the narrative appearing onscreen periodically. I don’t think I’ve seen a documentary that feels as if you are doing your own research, like this one does. Sierra Pettengill’s choice to - instead of narration - utilize text appearing onscreen to display information is a strange one, but it forces you to be engaged. It forces…

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  Review by Jamelle Bouie ★★★

  An interesting use of archival footage that is, I think, weighed down by the narration. The images — the constant commercial breaks are the key to this thing — should have been left to speak for themselves.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★½

  Impressive researched and the option to limit its material to military and mainstream media sources gives it some power. It is a counternarrative about consensus formation to justify the militarization of police that feel like it might be more pointed a couple decades ago, in 2022 it plays like a thesis movie that did great homework. I might like this better if it wasn't so careful limited to past, it is good at observing how a narrative take shape and suggest some what if scenario, but it also keep it very separated from the ways this same law and order justification keeps getting sustained by mainstream media today.

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  Review by Cory 🤍 ★★★★

  Important, bleak, informative, unsettling, interesting, tragic, frustrating, well-made, well-scored, and troubling.

  We’re So Fucked

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  Review by Morgan ★★★

  omg noooooo I don’t want to shoot a person 🙁 but I guess I will if it’s necessary 💪 just for funzies 😃

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★

  Covering events of US civil unrest from 1967-1970, Riotsville, U.S.A. is a documentary that examines the government's reaction and creation of "Riotsvilles," mock towns on military bases where police could be drilled in urban riot scenarios. The film, which opens in the wake of several riots in US cities, undeniably has some stunning moments, primarily when it focuses on some of the lesser-known events from the period. Filmmaker Sierra Pettengill, an archival researcher-turned-director, assembles the documentary almost entirely from archival footage, some from talk shows and TV news at the time and much of it from government archives. Unfortunately, however, the footage alone isn't enough. The material fails to be examined thoroughly from multiple angles or with commentator analysis. Resultingly, Riotsville, U.S.A. feels too much like a superficial show and tell that scarcely scratches the surface of its subject matter.