One of the greatest films ever made in any genre, The Thin Blue Line remains perhaps the most influential documentary film ever made - other contenders: Nanook of the North, Grey Gardens, Salesman, Don't Look Back et al. - not only in its blending of recreation and fiction with stone-cold fact and reportage, but also because of its aftermath, which saw the film's subject, supposed murderer, Randall Dale Adams, spectacularly released a year after The Thin Blue Line came out, partly because of the evidence this film provides (though there were other factors). A provocative film that at times plays out like a great Hollywood thriller, Errol Morris' film is both art and journalism, mixing talking-head interviews - which themselves are inventive and ingenious, with Morris placing his subjects' heads dead centre in the frame, as if we're looking right into and through them, a now-common device that Morris basically invented - with artfully lit recreations and scored by a haunting, mesmerising Philip Glass score to boot.
