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Sundance Review: “Middletown”

Written by: Christopher Llewellyn Reed | January 30th, 2025

l-r: MIDDLETOWN directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss

Middletown (Amanda McBaine/Jesse Moss, 2025) 5 out of 5 stars

As a rule, people in power never welcome investigation; at least, none directed at them. Witness what happens when journalists or prosecutors probe corruption in various government bodies: obfuscation, lies, and threats. Expect a lot more of that here at home in the years ahead, courtesy of America’s new reality.

But you don’t have to look only at our present to discover official misconduct. Examples exist throughout human history, in every time and place. Married directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (Boys State) give us a perfect one in their latest documentary, Middletown, which takes us back to the 1990s, when a high-school teacher and his intrepid video students uncovered the worst kind of crookedness in their own backyard.

The teacher in question was Mr. Fred Isseks, of Middletown High School, who initially began offering “Electronic English” to his seniors to shake up the curriculum a little bit. He raised enough funds to purchase rudimentary camera equipment, and before long, he and his pupils were off and about, looking for topics. At that time, in 1991, there were reports of noxious water and sludge on people’s properties in the area—Middletown is 60 miles north of New York City—and Isseks directed folks to look into that. At the very least, they might capture interesting material to cut together for class.

They found a lot more, and their activities led them to make a film about the local Wallkill Dump that would rattle people in the community. Could the indiscriminate disposal of chemicals by various industries account for the toxic waste and, even worse, for above-average cancer rates? Why was this allowed to happen? Try a combination of basic human venality and indolence.

Joshua Dickstein appears in MIDDLETOWN, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

The documentary consists of vast amounts of archival material intercut with footage from the video projects and present-day interviews with some of those now-fortysomething students, as well as with Fred Isseks. It’s fascinating to hear Middletown’s alumni reflect on what the experience meant to them, and how it changed their lives. Two of them, Jeffrey Dutemple and Rachel Raimist, today work in the media industry, he as a cinematographer and she as a director. This would not have happened without Fred’s inspiration.

It’s also extremely engaging to watch the students’ inquiries unfold back then, and see the kids develop into confident individuals. Side by side with that is our horror at what they unearthed and at how many crooks got away with actions leading to sickness and death (in other words, murder). Middletown, by its end, proves a profound meditation on good and evil, in their most direct forms. Even though many in our world today appear unable to differentiate the one from the other, the film makes it abundantly clear which is which. Sadly, it also shows that crime does not always lead to punishment.

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Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.

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