Titicut Follies is a very important film because its impact touches areas of law regarding private rights and public rights, and the final legal fate of the film will be of extreme importance, as a step forward or backward, to the future of documentary film-making. (p. 30)

The film is not as exciting or lurid as I had been led to believe, nor is it especially dramatic. Its main force must lie in the viewer's awareness that he is watching real people in an institution that exists as fact. This is not Marat/Sade. This is the reality of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater—at least as much of that reality as Wiseman chooses to let us see…. Wiseman is not guilty of "comment without correction," and if the institutions are the "real villains" of his films, that villainy and any resultant institutional guilt must be shared by...