Recensioni de* critic*

A surprisingly vivid portrait of the real Kitty Genovese emerges as her family, friends, and lovers reveal closely held secrets. Bill's final attempt to reclaim his sister's death is a reenactment worthy of Hitchcock and one of the most bracing documentary moments of the year.

True crime is the flavor du jour, but where Serial, The Jinx and Making A Murderer made household names of the accused Adnan Syed, Robert Durst, and Steven Avery respectively, The Witness achieves something far more vital: restoring its victim into full, breathing life... The Witness earns its catharsis, in which Bill finally lets go of his obsession with the facts of the case in favor of something more visceral and profound.

Though the press abuse angle is infuriating, the story of Bill, his siblings, his parents and his friends is devastating. The movie gets into how extraordinary events (such as murder) can complicate the already-fraught grieving process... This is a powerful movie, but perhaps its greatest triumph is that for a brief time it resurrects Kitty Genovese, and lets us see her as a person.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion famously wrote. Genovese likens his sister's death to a Rorschach test, and at its sharpest, The Witness is a careful inquiry into the tricks memory plays, and into how ambiguous events get reshaped into narratives that fit individual and collective needs.

Solomon and Genovese remind us that all witnesses can be unreliable, in one way or another. The emotional impact comes from the gentle way the film reveals Kitty Genovese as a loving, vibrant person, and not as a symbol.

While The Witness's investment in a multitude of topics both endemic and tangential to the case makes for snappy storytelling, it also radically condenses certain portions and zaps them of their depth... As structured, the film presents Genovese's identity as an afterthought, turning her living days and nights into incidental details that the filmmakers quickly hustle through in order to return to the circumstances surrounding her murder.

Solomon's directorial debut does not challenge the form or forge new ground in documentary filmmaking; it is not assembled in an artful way, featuring clunky editing and cinematography that merely seems to get the job done. Nevertheless, it is often surprisingly perceptive, unafraid to shift focus as the storylines steep and deepen.

The movie is far from perfect. Its pacing is clumsy, with too little sense of process, of action unfolding in the camera's presence... But far more experienced—and heralded—documentarians have never come up with the masterstroke in which the movie culminates. It's the movie's sole reënactment, and it's an inspired one. It doesn't illustrate action, it *is* action; the scene is a drama in itself, it's inseparable from the practical and material circumstances of its creation.

The Witness skillfully weaves together archival footage with the determined, seemingly unflappable brother's conversations with those with any connection, whether in life or death, to his beloved sibling. But here too there is a rush to arrive at soothing conclusions, the ending frustratingly belying the uncomfortable, knotty truths—and myths—that still cling to the Kitty Genovese case half a century later.

While the Times' sensationalistic distortions play a part in Solomon's account, his film's real achievement lies in illuminating the tragedy's nuances and human complexities. Kitty, her favorite younger brother Bill, their family and many others involved in the case, emerge as real, vulnerable people rather than convenient media symbols.