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Very disappointing...

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The voices and arguments here are not new. Read "The New Jim Crow." Read "Just Mercy." Read any critical analysis of modern American jurisprudence. But this film brilliantly assembles disparate voices (Newt Gingrich and Jelani Cobb? Together? Really?) to tell the story...to tell our story. DuVernay finds our nation's narrative arc. It may be disturbing, but it is also true. As the prison population ticks up, so does your understanding of who we have been and who we are becoming.

An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.The film was written by Ava DuVernay, who wrote and directed "Selma" (2015), and Spencer Averick. Spencer Averick edited the film. Produced and filmed in secrecy, 13th was revealed only after it was announced as the opening film for the 2016 New York Film Festival, the first documentary ever to open the festival.This is a great film about segregation, racial disparity, and laws about crime. But it does meaner a bit. From private prisons to ALEC to drugs to Wal-Mart's gun sales... it seems like some of this is not really directly connected to the central thesis. Though much of this does support an important point that few seem to grasp: the 13th Amendment effectively legalizes slavery, so long as a crime exits.

The aim of the documentary is to show how the over-represented black prison population is all the state/corporations/white people's fault essentially, providing very little of the documentary's time to counter-opinion.Arguably, the most reasoned argument in the entire documentary was a 10 second clip of Bill Clinton, completely destroying the argument that crack cocaine was banned and severely punished as an anti-black measure when, given the vast magnitude of harm the drug did to urban and black communities, the prohibition of it guarded those same communities unlike the weaker protections offered to the mainly suburban white communities from the harms of normal cocaine, where punishment of possession/distribution was, the documentary claims (without statistics), less harsh. By that reasoning, the war on drugs was anti-white. I don't agree with either reasoning because I don't agree that the war on drugs was motivated by race nor do I agree with the central argument of the documentary that the incarceration rates of African-Americans are so high because of a white conspiracy. Poor documentary. 4/10.

This could have been a great movie, it's so sad that they want to change the people's perception of black people by lying and what's worse is that they use this movie as a way to spread out political propaganda. In my opinion this is not helping the black community, it actually makes things worse. Black people don't need pity, they need equal rights, equal treatment and to be seen as equal people and members of the community. We've had and have so many black icons and role models, yet this movie portraits the black people as victims. The treatment they have to suffer because of racial profiling is 100% true, and this needs to be changed first... but this approach is wrong. Prove the narrow minded that black people are not subhumans, tell the world how they enriched our way of life and culture, educate the black people's way of thinking and attitude. By spreading subtle hate messages towards a presidential candidate you fuel this ongoing media war and diversion between people living under the same "roof". A few ingredients have been added to this movie: dramatization, dramatization and more dramatization, altered facts and political propaganda, meaning that this is another tool for a certain political candidate to secure his position in the presidential campaign, making a fool out of the viewers, the true victims of the black communities, just to gain political support. If you want to help, do it for real, that's what the people need, genuine and efficient good intentions and actions.