How sad is this?

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Fresh and Exciting

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

I'm not sure how any of the other reviews were 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, etc. "A sophomoric attempt at film-making" Amen!!! This is truly one of the worse documentaries. Not only are the facts inaccurate, distorted, and omitted, but also the credibility of the witnesses ivy meerpool interviews leaves viewers who were unsure of the Rosenbergs certain of their guilt. In short, no credibility. Especially the over reaching grand daughters with scenes of hyperbolic emotion. Growing up with biased and hearsay. Even Meerpools methods as a pseudo journalist with follow- up questions was baffling. Meerpool makes the assumption that everyone knows the story, which with this case, she shouldn't have--filmmaking 101, Journalism 101. Attempting to persuade the audience emotionally and with "evidence" that her grandparents were wrongly convicted, as a rhetorician I would use this film as a failing attempt and untrustworthy.

Writer-director Ivy Meerepol has been accused of being 'amateurish' or 'naive' in the making of this exceptional film. For me, this lack of 'slickness' is why this doc packs such an emotionally wallop. The starkness and edginess, along with Meerepol's own tentative uncertainties, were entirely commensurate with the shadowy period she was investigating.I was much impressed by Meerepol, who took on a huge challenge: how to find the truth, warts and all, about her larger-than-life grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. She is an intelligent and sensitive person on a journey of determined discovery about an era blanketed by dark suspicion and paranoia. I was 15 years old when the Rosenbergs were executed. It was a time of madness in America (a fairly constant thing to this day in my opinion). The norm was mass hysteria, fueled by the American government, about the Red Menace. It was the age of grisly neo-fascists like the alcohol-ridden lunatic Joe McCarthy, the deeply closeted gay-basher Roy Cohn, noted drag queen J. Edgar Hoover, and, yes, Tricky Dicky Nixon. All of them (and many others) casually destroyed countless lives with righteous indignation. They were the last people who should be indignant, righteously or otherwise. Joe Stalin, a great American ally only a few years before (echoes of Saddam and bin Laden 40 years later), was still alive and served as the ideal American villain. He was part of the Axis of Evil long before George Bush pretended he invented the term. These were the hostile social and political conditions surrounding the sacrificial killing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It was only a few years after George Orwell wrote '1984,' but the mind control featured in that book was already embedded in the psyche of the 'Free World'.I was much impressed by Ivy's persistence, and by the brilliant commentary and encouragement of her father Michael (the Rosenbergs' eldest son). When Ivy arranges for Michael and his brother Robert to visit their parents' old apartment, it was a creepy (and powerful) moment in the film. The two brothers seemed overwhelmed by the eerie 'sameness' of the apartment. They were also spooked by the very same elevator that, 50 years earlier, contained a small army of FBI agents who stormed into the apartment and arrested their father. From the moment he left the apartment and stepped into that elevator with the FBI agents, Julius Rosenberg was doomed. This documentary is outstanding, and Ivy Meerepol deserves tremendous credit.

We all should know what kind of person Roy Cohn was...we also know what a maniac McCarthy was. It was a different world back then.I think the question to ask about the Rosenbergs is this:Why were the executed when other alleged spies were not?But in the same token...If they were innocent like they maintained to the end of their lives, why didn't they just comply with the agencies and turn in some other spies that were higher in the ranks and spare their children from being orphans?Were they members of a Communist party? Probably...Did they pass along information about the a-bomb to Russia? Doubtful...Did their crimes justify the death sentence?I think the documentary was well done and brought back a lot of questions that still haunt many people in the US.

Growing up, I had heard the story numerous times of Julius and Ethel. Ethel was my grandmother' cousin. I remember the tale of family members asking for aide and guidance, but that if "the government says they did it..." My family didn't want to get involved either. As a child I always wanted to know: What happened to the kids? Who raised them? Where were they now? Did they know they still had family? This movie really helped me to fill in some blanks-- especially after the creepy encounter my family had at my great-grandmother's funeral a few years back--- David and Ruth Greenglass made an appearance. To my knowledge, the family hadn't had contact with them in decades and there they were--hoping for a handout. Hoping their was some money in it for them. Cowards and Scavengers. That's how I think of them. May God have mercy on their souls for what they did.