Despite its title, Keith Beauchamp's The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till places few new facts in the public record. The basic story has been unchanged since 1955. Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, was visiting his grandfather in Money, Miss., when he was pulled from the house by two white men. Days later, his horribly beaten body was discovered, bound to a 70-pound cotton gin fan with barbed wire. The men, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury, whose hourlong deliberation included a break for drinks. Then, insulated from prosecution, they sold Look magazine the story of how they murdered Till for whistling at Bryant's wife. To this, Beauchamp adds only a brief anecdote suggesting that Till may have been provoked, and a few incoherently vague allegations that Bryant and Milam may have had assistance planning and covering up their crime. This imprecision is apparently deliberate—Beauchamp helped convince prosecutors to reopen the case, and so has been asked to withhold information that might be critical at trial. But the movie (too brief, at 70 minutes) is slipshod in other ways, glossing over Milam and Bryant's trial and moving awkwardly into the present (with no explanation, for example, of why New York's City Council should be debating the reopening of Till's case).

Untold Story accrues inestimable power, though, from the person of Mamie Till Mobley, Till's mother. Mobley recalls her first view of her son's nearly destroyed face, and her historic decision to insist on an open-casket funeral, to "let the people see what they did to my boy." A half-century later, Till's casket has been thrust open again (literally; his body was exhumed in June), and the fight for justice too long delayed goes on.

Some of the men in Jessica Sanders' After Innocence have been waiting almost as long: Nick Yarris spent 26 years in Pennsylvania jails; Calvin Willis 22 years in Louisiana. What all Sanders' subjects have in common is that they were exonerated by DNA testing—although, amazingly, even that wasn't always enough to get them freed. After Innocence doesn't live up to its title, either: Sanders deals only cursorily with re-entry issues, focusing mainly on wrongful convictions and the men who endured them. But the film paints a compelling portrait of a justice system ill-equipped to admit mistakes, let alone correct them. The film's most poignant moment is also its simplest: As Wilson Dedge, exonerated by DNA but kept in prison by Florida prosecutors on a technicality, awaits release, his mother smoothes the bedsheets in his room, silently praying for his release. Mamie Till Mobley died in 2003 without seeing justice for her son; Dedge's mother narrowly escapes the same fate.

The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till

After Innocence

Directed by Keith Beauchamp A ThinkFilm release Opens Friday at Riverview

recommended

After Innocence

Directed by Jessica Sanders A New Yorker release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

recommended