Blucher One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Alasdair Orr Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

a_baron Sean Penn is an accomplished actor, but this documentary in which he is not seen, is unquestionably the most important film of his distinguished career. In the 1980s, a Satanic abuse panic spread throughout the United States, the most notable examples of which were McMartin and Bakersfield. The latter started as allegations of regular child sexual abuse, but grew into lurid tales of Satanism. One man was accused of murdering his son; the fact that the boy was very much alive did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the witchfinders.Any claim of sexual abuse that includes women should automatically be suspect; one woman is passable, but a group of them? They just don't do that sort of thing, yet the fantasies persist to this day. These poor people were sentenced to dozens and in some cases hundreds of years in prison after being convicted on hundreds of charges on no evidence worthy of the name.Jeff Modahl spent 15 years behind bars; he was freed only after a tape came to light of a therapist, (so-called) and law enforcement coaching one of the young non-victims. John Stoll served 20 years, being freed on his 61st birthday. Even more sadly, two of those accused died in prison without clearing their names."Witch Hunt" includes much archive footage, interviews with parents, children (some now with children of their own), and some comments from the unrepetent persecutors who claim there was no actual witch hunt. This documentary is more relevant than ever at the time of review in light of the ongoing persecution and wilful miscarriages of justice being enacted here in the UK.

lazur-2 Who originally accused the parents? We have the right to face our accusers. Surely we aren't considering the children to be the accusers; they weren't brought in for questioning out of nowhere. Even if the accusers were (wrongly) granted anonymity, all bets should be off after their accusations have been proved maliciously false. Send -those- people to prison for 300 years. ( My God, don't tell me these charges were brought on the basis of anonymous phone calls!)/// OK, the existence of the children's medical records was denied, but why didn't the - defense- DEMAND medical examinations?/// How much ignorance, incompetence, collusion, deception, careerism, and presumption of guilt can we tolerate while these political hacks continue to claim that there was no evil intent. How evil does evil have to be before we call it by its name?

snapper100 You will have read other comments, obviously this was a travesty on every front for each family and everyone affected.I was disappointed that it did not go in to any detail as to WHY the police just knocked on their doors with warrants and took their children away.Who made the decision to just arrest these people and on what grounds - I think that's a question anyone would ask after watching it. People somewhere should have been bought to justice, surely!? You would certainly hope so.Regardless this takes nothing away from a very interesting and shocking insight in to so called justice - replicated all around the world of course. I would highly recommend watching Witch Hunt. I can only hope these poor people were given millions in compensation and can find some forgiveness.Bless your souls!

Robert J. Maxwell If I were judging this as a public service message, I'd give it a higher grade. As a documentary film, it spends all but the last fifteen minutes of its time on case studies of four or five families convicted of child molestation in Bakersfield, California. There were several dozen convictions, some 35 of which were reversed years later -- and I mean years. One innocent man and wife were excoriated by the judge and received cumulative sentences of more than 500 years. Before finding an organization willing to look closely into their cases, four of the cases we follow served ten or twenty years. (What do you do when you've spent 20 years in jail and are released on your 60th birthday, as one victim was?) And it was hard time, too -- San Quentin, where child molesters must claim they were convicted of owning automatic weapons and possession of marijuana if they want to live.It's interesting to see the development of the cases, the means by which convictions were brought, and the experiences of the victims, their children, their families and friends.One weakness -- aside from the unnecessarily lugubrious score -- is that there is really no attempt at an explanation, no attempt that involves any sophistication anyway. One or another of the talking heads attributes the wave of mass hysteria to "political ambition," "zealotry," and what we would call "command pressure." But those explanations don't tell us much. Let me put it this way. Why -- out of all the avenues of advancement -- did the politically ambitious District Attorney (who has been reelected seven times) happen to choose child molestation as his conduit to power? "Zealotry" is a personality trait that explains nothing. It's like saying "greed causes robbery." And "command pressure" -- the sense that those above you must be given the performance that they want from you -- is omnipresent, and constants can't explain variations.I'd love to have seen the case studies squeezed into one hour and the rest of the time given over to an examination of the causes of this craze at the time it happened in Bakersfield -- or rather the causes of these kinds of crazes as they happen again and again, over generations, over centuries. Because, when you get right down to it, collectively and historically, we've seen all this before in one form or another. Witchcraft, Freemasons, hidden Communists, pre-school porno rings, and Satanism. For the past few years we've been working on "internet predators" that do not exist to any measurable extent, according to the only scientifically respectable study that I'm aware of. (I taught sociology, including classes on social problems that used to be called "mass hysteria.") What started this particular craze in this particular place? And, equally important, what stopped it when it was finally ended? The explanation must lie in the system itself, the entire social system, of which the legal system is only an instrument. You can't really blame it on an ambitious DA.Is there some reason society NEEDS an internal enemy to hate? Anyway, that's a lot of criticism of a film that desperately needed making and would have been far more useful if it had been made twenty or twenty-five years ago. God, how many lives have been ruined by our righteous wrath?