Abacus: Small Enough to Jail

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail is a 2016 American

Abacus received generally positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has a rating of 93%, based on 72 reviews, with an average rating of 7.51/10.The website's critical consensus states, "Abacus: Small Enough to Jail transcends its less-than-dramatic trappings to present a gripping real-life legal thriller with far-reaching implications".^[9] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 73 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[10]

Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com declared Abacus to be "another classic" from Steve James,^[11] giving the film 4 out of 4 stars. He praised James' "knack for finding the universal within the specific, and often a much larger and more complex story nestled within a specific account of one event." Seitz also pointed out that even though the film is engrossing as a legal thriller, "it's even more notable as a portrait of a community. James... has constructed a rich and revealing context for this tale, and it's one that is rarely showcased in American cinema.... a thriving community [Chinatown] that defines itself in relation the mainstream of American culture and that is aspirational but never entirely comfortable or accepted."^[12]

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Club, however, gave the film a C+, considering it to be "pleasant" yet "inessential", with its "unusually literal" documentary style applied to a narrative that could have been efficiently told in a magazine article. Vishnevetsky stated that "[p]erhaps the problem is that he isn’t one to extrapolate, interrogate, or pry subjects open; his best films are chronicles of hopes, dreams, and hardships made possible by the trust James works to elicit from his subjects."^[13]

The Guardian critic wrote that "engrossing tale of the bank that was bullied" and gave 4 stars out of 5.^[14]

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