Samantha N. Sheppard

During his 1964 acceptance speech for the Academy Award for Best Actor, Sidney Poitier, slightly winded from his trek to the stage, breathily asserted, “Because it is a long journey to this moment, I am naturally indebted to countless numbers of people.” Poitier’s labored emphasis on the “long journey to this moment” underscored both the stamina of his onscreen appeal and his protracted route to acclaim that began with his 1950 film debut in No Way Out.

The prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore once wrote, “Prison is not a building ‘over there,’ but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere.” This idea is the focus of the filmmaker Garrett Bradley’s Time, a gripping documentary that reframes the perception of mass incarceration and its far-reaching effects.