‘Free Leonard Peltier’ Review: Engaging Doc About Activist Accused of Killing Two FBI Agents in 1975 Is Timelier Than Ever
variety.comJoe Leydon Film Critic It’s the sort of twist no screenwriter would dare invent: “Free Leonard Peltier,” a persuasively well-researched and often infuriating documentary about the American Indian Movement activist convicted nearly a half-century ago of killing two FBI agents, had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan.
27, 2025 — precisely one week after Joe Biden, as one of his very last official acts as U.S. president, issued a commutation of Peltier’s life sentences.
The relatively brief final sequence in the film is obviously a last-minute addition to a completed feature, but never mind: Dramatically and emotionally satisfying, the scene is a welcome and fitting capper for a story that inarguably earns its happy ending.
It’s a story that has been brought to the screen twice before: Once as the factual inspiration for the fictions of “Thunderheart,” the 1992 drama directed by Michael Apted, starring Val Kilmer and Graham Greene; and again as “Incident at Oglala,” the acclaimed documentary also directed by Apted and released in 1992, narrated by Robert Redford. “Free Leonard Peltier” has an appreciably wider focus, placing the incidents detailed here in the context of America’s long and shameful history of exploiting, betraying and even murdering Native people.
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