Deliver Us from Evil (2006)

Focus: Victims and their families share their stories of abuse and the difficulties they have had rebuilding their lives as writer-director Amy Berg recreates the timeline of when Oliver O'Grady was first accused of molesting a child, the years the Catholic Church spent shuffling him around from one small-town California parish to another as he sexually abused untold numbers of children, and his arrest nearly three decades later.

It's tough to separate the subject matter from the documentary. I am in awe of the courage it took Anne, Nancy, Adam, and their parents to participate in this feature. Their interviews are gut-wrenchingly honest. None are more heartbreaking than the interviews with the parents, particular with Bob and Maria, Anne's parents. It's horrifying what they all went through, and the bravery that it takes for these parents to face the camera and admit the extent to which they were duped and the extent to which they blamed themselves is beyond noble. If I went in for that sort of thing, I'd call for them to be elevated to the realm of saints.

That said, and truly meant, Berg's not the best director. She lines up an erudite and articulate group of experts, and they do a very good job of illuminating the situation from both perspectives. That she gets O'Grady to walk her through everything that happened (he's roaming free back in Ireland, just so you know) is a testament to her power as a interviewer, especially given that the Church declined to comment. But the first twenty to thirty minutes of this 101 minute documentary drag, mostly because of poorly chosen clips. Berg finds her footing and send the thing humming along, but, given the highly disturbing subject, she really should have gotten the doc moving far sooner in order to prevent the audience from walking out.

Mind you, she does an incredible job of waiting for her interviewees to tell the real story.

Still, I find myself wishing that I had seen the movie promised by the trailer, a doc so powerful it dared you to ignore it, all set to Johnny Cash's cover of "God's Gonna Cut You Down."* Even so, it is all but impossible to overlook. A-

*Okay, perhaps I would have been placated if the song had appeared in the film.