Critics reviews

At times, I found myself wishing Berg focused more on Brower and Krakauer's investigations and given the film a more present-tense narrative. This is a fascinating movie, but there's a lot to cover here, and one can occasionally feel lost amid all the strands.

Drawing on archival material, landscape beauty shots and testimonials, including from former F.L.D.S. members, Ms. Berg has created an unnerving, sometimes infuriating documentary. She makes smart choices throughout as she weaves together this chronicle of faith and abuse.

Prophet's Prey is no comforting, trial-heavy procedural about a bad guy being brought to justice. Instead, it's far more unsettling: the story of a criminal despot who, like some Mafia don, rules his fiefdom from behind bars, with the help of a trusted lieutenant, as surely as he did when he was free.

One watches Prophet's Prey with an escalating sense of disbelief and horror, as Warren's steadily revealed to be an even greater monster than we initially take him for. You keep expecting the story to emotionally plateau at some point, but it grows darker and more deranged.

Where Gibney's film [Going Clear] was a richly layered and oft-witty examination of religion and public perception of it, Prophet's Prey is alarmingly conventional and one-note, feeling almost like a shallow online addendum to the book on which it is based.

In her devastating 2006 documentary "Deliver Us From Evil" and last year's controversial Hollywood expose "An Open Secret," director Amy Berg brilliantly uncovered the face of sexual deviance in corridors of power. She does it again to deeply disturbing effect in "Prophet's Prey," a gripping, authoritative account of the myriad abuses of Warren Jeffs, the currently incarcerated leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.