Carla Hayden with Ava DuVernay on 14th. Photograph: Paul Garnes/Netflix View image in fullscreen Carla Hayden with Ava DuVernay on 14th. Photograph: Paul Garnes/Netflix First look review Documentary films Review 14th review – Ava DuVernay’s galvanizing documentary is a remarkable achievement New York film festival: the director has made a fascinating and troubling companion piece to her Netflix documentary 13th, which takes a fiery look at American injustice
Adrian Horton Sat 10 Oct 2026 03.00 CEST Last modified on Sat 10 Oct 2026 03.01 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I t feels at once like the blink of an eye and an eternity since Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th arrived on Netflix, a month before the election of Donald Trump to his first term as president. The intervening decade has more or less borne out the film’s thesis on the enduring specter of white supremacy in American life: that a clause within the 13th amendment abolishing chattel slavery – that involuntary servitude could be used as punishment for a crime – was immediately and continually exploited to criminalize black people, mass incarceration thus being the modern incarnation of America’s original sin.
Read more The Oscar-nominated film, which saw a surge in viewership during the protests of 2020, has remained both a time capsule of late Obama-era moral clarity and, arguably, the acclaimed director’s best picture. At least, until now – 14th, DuVernay’s sequel, of sorts, soon also to arrive on Netflix , is just as lucid and galvanizing as its predecessor, with an updated, more pressing urgency befitting a democracy in distress.
The new film focuses its brisk 110 minutes on the 14th amendment, adopted in the aftermath of the civil war, in a moment of profound political destabilization. The five-point statute may be lesser-known and not widely understood, but the film summarily makes the case for its status as the “workhorse amendment”, the “magnum opus of American democracy”, to quote several of the film’s illustrious figures. Once again, DuVernay marshals a murderers’ row of constitutional experts and political figures, from Stacey Abrams to Hasan Piker, Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and also, for some token Republican context, the former “Never Trumper” senator Jeff Flake and current anti-birthright citizenship Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who gets ruthlessly factchecked by some title cards). DuVernay stages her largely persuasive cast – lawyers, politicians, civil rights organizers and more – in striking, stately tableaux, before marble and monuments, underscoring the argument for the amendment’s status as the epitome of humanist sophistication: government by the people, for all the people.
View image in fullscreen Ava DuVernay with Dr David Blight. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix The heavy lifting in this argument is cogently provided by Sherrilyn Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a law professor at Howard University, where she founded the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy; Ifill is a warm yet precise narrator, masterfully laying out the case that the verbose, multi-pronged amendment is actually the scaffolding upon which hang our hopes for a true multi-racial, multi-faith democracy. It is the 14th amendment that guarantees birthright citizenship as well as voting rights, that bars insurrectionists from again holding public office (you know what awful, infuri…