UNITED STATES
The New York Times

By MANOHLA DARGIS
SEPT. 17, 2015

The chief attraction of Colorado City, or so it would seem from the brief entry on the website of the Arizona Office of Tourism, isn’t Colorado City but the “nearby scenic attractions” that include the Vermilion and Shinarump Cliffs. Set at the base of ravishing red cliff mountains, the city and its twin, Hildale, Utah, look straight out of Canaan. To watch “Prophet’s Prey,” Amy Berg’s tough and disturbing documentary about a secretive, polygamous Mormon fundamentalist sect with unsettling roots in the region, is to grasp, perhaps, the unspoken reason the Arizona tourism office seems to be suggesting that visitors drive right on by.

The writer Jon Krakauer didn’t get the message. As he explains in “Prophet’s Prey,” his interest in these particular fundamentalists was sparked when, in 1999, he stopped at a gas station close…