The Paradise Lost Trilogy (1996-2011)

Following the lead of the greatest crime documentary ever made—Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988)—the Paradise Lost trilogy dove so deep in its murder investigation of three wrongfully accused, nonconformist boys that it helped free them from prison and bring to light the corruption of forced confessions, the awareness of mental illness, and a modern-day lesson of not judging a book by its cover.

I followed this documentary’s origin on HBO in 1996. I absorbed the alluring and haunting Metallica guitar shredding in the background while the helicopter shot flew over the dense West Memphis, Arkansas woods where the unthinkable occurred. I witnessed with my jaw clenched the long overdue liberation of Jessie Misskelley, Jr., Jason Baldwin, and Damien Wayne Echols in 2011. There was relief at the end, but it was accompanied by a resentment for the state’s abuse of justice. The poor boys should have never spent a night behind those bars, let alone 18 years.

If you possess the crime documentary indulgence like I do and feasted on the likes of The Staircase (2004), The Innocence Files (2020), or Making a Murderer on Netflix, you will most likely appreciate the genre’s foundation in the Paradise Lost trilogy. What started as an amateurish observance of three presumed guilty children morphed into a wrongful imprisonment project that continues to influence cases we stream today.

The raw, narration-less, point-and-shoot style of Directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky lets the images do the talking and casts the audience as the jury. Without directorial interference, all three entries in the trilogy feel unbiased and cold without being calculated. “Satanic panic” rocked the 90s and connected the witch hunt dots between three outlier boys who listened to death metal and a heinous crime. It was too easy. It was so much more difficult retracting the sin.

When it comes to crime documentaries, The Paradise Lost Trilogy, without question, is my favorite and lands in the middle of my Top 50.

Reely Bernie Faves:

1. Amadeus (1984)

2. Magnolia (1999)

3. Poltergeist (1982)

4. Pulp Fiction (1994)

5. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

6. The Godfather Part II (1974)

7. Weekend at Bernie’s (1989)

8. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

9. Goodfellas (1990)

10. Nosferatu (1922)

11. Pollock (2000)

12. Kicking and Screaming (1995)

13. Jaws (1975)

14. Fargo (1996)

15. Citizen Kane (1941)

16. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

17. The Endless Summer (1966)

18. Back to the Future (1985)

19. Angel Heart (1987)

20. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

21. The Goonies (1985)

22. Trainspotting (1996)

23. King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)

24. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

25. Bambi (1942)

26. The Paradise Lost Trilogy (1996-2011)

27. Psycho (1960)

28. Parenthood (1989)

29. Swingers (1996)

30. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

31. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

32. Smoke (1995)

33. Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

34. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

35. Edward Scissorhands (1990)

36. City of God (2002)

37. 1917 (2019)

38. Black Swan (2010)

39. School of Rock (2003)

40. Mulholland Drive (2001)

41. Groundhog Day (1993)

42. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

43. The Greatest Showman (2017)

44. National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)

45. The Florida Project (2017)

46. Cinema Paradiso (1988)

47. So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993)

48. Shadowlands (1993)

49. Steve Jobs (2015)

50. ¡Three Amigos! (1986)