Sundance Channel - Sin City Law
Peabody and Academy Award®-winning filmmakers Denis Poncet and Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (THE STAIRCASE, MURDER ON A SUNDAY MORNING) present a revealing look at American justice in an eight-part documentary series set in the Las Vegas courts.
NYTimes.com says:
Felons and Lawyering in Las Vegas
The truth is somewhere in between, and rarely more memorable than as rendered in “Sin City Law,” a Sundance Channel documentary series set in Las Vegas and beginning tonight.
On each of four consecutive Mondays a pair of hourlong episodes chronicles a grisly homicide complicated by the lawless, lurid abandon for which the city is known. A team of French filmmakers, led by the producer Denis Poncet and the director Jean-Xavier De Lestrade, focuses not only on those ensnared by their own misdeeds but also on the prosecutors and public defenders. The lawyers don’t come off as robots or freak shows. They’re simply adversaries whose skill, compassion and sacrifice forge a resolution — whether plea deal, guilty verdict or exoneration.
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Variety.com says:
An intimate look at attorneys on both sides of the justice system isn't anything new, but in the hands of Oscar-winning documentarians Denis Poncet and Jean-Xavier De Lestrade, Sundance Channel's four-week, eight-hour series "Sin City Law" feels like a fresh take on those lawyers who represent criminals that dwell on the bottom of the food chain. Subject matter is a bit off-brand for a cabler that deals more with iconoclasts than crooks, but net's execs, smartly, didn't want to let good material get away.
While Las Vegas acts as a hook here, the locale could be anywhere U.S.A., so the title feels a bit misleading. Those wanting for stories about casinos heists won't have their craving satisfied. Yet those who turn away because of that fact will be missing out.
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HBO - The Wire
Slate.com says: The Wire on FireAnalyzing the best show on televisionAnalyzing the best show on television.
The Wire ,which has just begun its fourth season on HBO, is surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America. This claim isn't based on my having seen all the possible rivals for the title, but on the premise that no other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.
During its first year, it was possible to mistake The Wire for merely an unusually shrewd and vivid police drama. But the program has gotten richer and more ambitious with each season and now fits only into a category it defines by itself: the urban procedural. Its protagonist is the broken American city of Baltimore, depicted with obsessive verisimilitude and affectionate rage. Its fundamental concern is the isolation and degradation of the black underclass, a subject that has, with the exception of a blip after Hurricane Katrina, disappeared from the political radar screen. If the national conscience is ready for another sleepless night about the waste of lives in the ghetto, I expect that The Wire will be what keeps us awake.
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