Have to back up this post by the (normally unreadable) David Bernstein over at the Volokh Conspiracy (the Village Voice piece he links to is great too). Capturing the Friedmans is a completely excellent documentary--not in the Super Size Me sense of being an amusing stunt or in the Fahrenheit 911 sense of being effective propaganda (though both too are great movies)--but in the sense of actually being an incredibly moving, extremely disturbing, incredibly thought-provoking work of cinematic art.

Find a video store that has it (Blockbuster may not, but someone does) and check it out. I'll wait.

...

Now that you've seen the movie, you're prepared to enter into two different but equally fascinating areas of discourse:

(The Local) To what extent if any were either or both Friedmans actually guilty of the crimes of which they were accused? What makes you think so?

(The Meta) Is the documentary filmmaker beholden to the truth (that Jesse Friedman is almost certainly largely if not entirely innocent, that the filmaker knows it, could have proved it, and chose not to) or to his art (since the ambiguous version of the movie is far better than the non-ambiguous version would or could have been)? That is, must the artist take a side?