| | Keystone cops - Harvard Independent - Arts (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-26) |
 | | Playing with the audience's jaded expectations of courtroom drama, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade's documentary, shot in a grainy video style that evokes both COPS and the OJ Simpson trial, paints a picture of police department incompetence no fiction could ever convincingly imagine, and a bureaucratic malignity all the more frightening because it is totally real. |
 | | From the film's beginning, which captures the depositions of the principle detectives involved (they admit to singling Butler out on the basis of his race alone) to his inconsistent, but adamant identification by the victim's aged husband, Murder is liable to provoke intense and righteous anger in its audience. |
 | | The African-American "interrogation specialist" beats a confession out of Butler, and though he explicitly plays on his race during testimony in claiming a false rapport with the accused, he is also simply a corrupt cop who owes his position to football-player brawn and a sheriff uncle. |
| www.harvardindependent.com /news/2002/03/07/Arts/Keystone.Cops-205547.shtml (543 words) |