Law on Film

Erin Brockovich (2000) (directed by Steven Soderbergh) is based on the true story of Erin Brockovich, a legal assistant without formal training, who uncovers one of the most significant environmental lawsuits in U.S. history: the case against Pacific Gas and Electric for contaminating groundwater in Hinkley, California. The film, which features an Oscar-winning performance by Julia Roberts in the...

This episode examines a case that sits at the uneasy boundary between criminal adjudication, media power, and moral authority: the prosecution and execution of Aileen Wuornos, labeled the “first female serial killer. We look at two documentaries by Nick Broomfield— Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)—alongside the feature film...

My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow (2024) is Russian-language American documentary film written and directed by Julia Loktev (with co-director Anna Nemzer). The film describes the effort to maintain press freedoms in Putin’s Russia in the period leading up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The documentary provides an intimate portrait of independent Russian jou...

Small Things Like These (2024), adapted by Edna Walsh from Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel, tells the story of how coal merchant Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) uncovers disturbing secrets in a small Irish town in the mid-1980s. While going about his job delivering coal, Furlong discovers the truth about the Magdalene laundries—the abusive asylums run by Roman Catholic institutions from the 1820s until 1...

We return to Syriana, a film we discussed previously in Episode 40, but one that feels newly urgent in light of the current war with Iran. When it was released in 2005, the film offered a dense, unsettling portrait of a post-9/11 world shaped by oil, covert operations, and overlapping networks of state and corporate power. Today, Syriana reads less as a product of its time and more as a reflection...

This episode looks at The Lives of Others , Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s haunting exploration of surveillance, complicity, and the brittle architecture of authoritarian legality in the final years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany). The critically acclaimed 2006 film examines how law can be co-opted into an instrument of domination, how bureaucratic routines of “security” n...

The Killing Fields (1984), directed by Roland Joffe, depicts the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia and the genocide that followed, which resulted in the death of approximately 2-3 million people. The film is based on the experiences of New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterson) and Cambodian journalist Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor). It provides a haunting depiction of mass violence as we...

In Conclave (2024), Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) organizes a conclave to elect a new pope. Key candidates and factions vie with one another as the process plays out until finally a new pope is elected. The film was directed by Edward Berger from a script by Peter Straughan (based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris), and features an all-star cast including Fiennes, John Lithgow, Stanley...

Inglourious Basterds (2009), written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, revolves around two plots to assassinate Nazi leaders during the closing years of World War II. One plot centers on a secret band of Jewish-American soldiers under the command of Ltn. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt)—the “Basterds”—who terrorize Nazis. The other involves Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman who narro...

I’m Still Here (dir. Walter Salles, 2024) is based on the true story of the enforced disappearance and murder of former congressman Rubens Paiva by the military dictatorship in Brazil. The film opens in Rio de Janeiro in 1970, where Rubens lives with his wife, Eunice, and their five children. Their lives are forever altered when the military government arrests and disappears Rubens. The film descr...

This episode explores An Officer and a Spy (J’accuse in French), Roman Polanski’s 2019 film about the Dreyfus Affair in France. The Dreyfus Affair is one of most significant events in late 19th/early 20th century, an event whose implications reverberated for decades in France and around the world. The Dreyfus Affair centered around the military trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason...

This episode examines Juror #2 , Clint Eastwood’s most recent—and perhaps final—film. Juror #2 centers around the trial of a man accused of murdering his girlfriend after a fight at a bar, leaving her in a ditch by the side of a road. The twist comes early: Justin Kemp a/k/a Juror #2 (played by Nicholas Hoult) soon realizes that the wrong man is on trial—as he hears the evidence, Kemp figures out...

Vindication Swim (2024) tells the story of Mercedes Gleitze, the first British woman to swim the English Channel in 1927. This major accomplishment, however, was soon called into question when another swimmer made a dubious claim to the same feat. To defend her integrity and her legacy, Gleitze (Kirsten Callaghan) attempted what she called her “vindication swim” — a second crossing of the English...

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. Based on Mario Puzo’s best-selling 1969 novel, The Godfather depicts the rise and legacy of the Corleone family, a fictional Italian-American organized crime family led by Vito Corleone and the transformation of his son Michael from a reluctant outsider to a ruthless mafia boss. The film, which...

No Other Land (2024) is the Oscar-winning documentary that shows the brutal destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank. Recorded between 2019 to 2023, the film tells the story of Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist, who has been protesting the Israeli army’s destruction of homes and eviction of villagers. Adra is assisted by Yuval Abraham, a Jewish Israeli journalist. (T...

The Return of Martin Guerre is a 1982 French historical drama directed by Daniel Vigne and staring Gerard Depardieu. The film describes the historical case of Martin Guerre who leaves his young wife Bertrande (Nathalie Baye) in the small French village of Artigat to fight in a war and travel. Around eight years later, the false Martin (played by Depardieu) returns to the village to resume his life...

This episode examines The Conformist , Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 political drama set in 1930s Italy. The film centers on Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a mid-level Fascist functionary who is ordered to assassinate his former professor, an anti-fascist dissident living in Paris. The film, which includes many flashbacks to Clerici’s early life and decision to join the secret police, pro...

Dark Waters (2019), directed by Todd Haynes, tells the real-life story of how a lawyer, Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), waged a twenty-year battle to hold the DuPont corporation accountable for contaminating a local water supply with carcinogenic chemicals that poisoned tens of thousands of people. While Bilott is ultimately able to achieve some degree of compensation and justice for the victims, the f...

This episode examines I Just Didn’t Do It , a 2007 Japanese film written and directed by Masayuki Suo. In the film, 26-year-old Teppei Kaneko (played by Ryo Kase) is traveling to a job interview on a packed Tokyo commuter train when a 15-year-old school girl, who was standing in front of him on the train and whom Kaneko hardly noticed, wrongly accuses him of groping ( chikan ). Kaneko is  arrested...

This episode looks at On the Waterfront , the celebrated 1954 American film directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg. The film stars Marlon Brando as the ex-prize fighter turned New Jersey longshoreman Terry Malloy. Malloy struggles to stand up to mob-affiliated union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) after Malloy is lured into setting up a fellow dockworker whom Friendly has murdered...

Muhammad Ali is widely recognized as one of the greatest athletes of all-time and one of the most important figures of the 20th century. In addition to his long and celebrated career as a boxer and three-time heavyweight champion of the world, Ali changed the conversation about race, religion, and politics in America. Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War on re...

Syriana is a 2005 geopolitical thriller written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, based loosely on former CIA case officer Robert Baer’s memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism . The film weaves together multiple storylines that involve a CIA agent, a U.S. energy analyst, a major transnational law firm, and an oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdom. It tackl...

The Goldman Case ( Le Procès Goldman ) (2023), is a French courtroom drama based on the real-life 1976 trial of Pierre Goldman, a far-left Jewish militant who was accused of multiple armed robberies and four murders during a holdup of a pharmacy in Paris. The film, which was directed by Cedric Kahn from screenplay by Kahn and Nathalie Hertzberg, stars Arieh Worthalter as Goldman and Arthur Harari...

Mr. Untouchable , a 2007 documentary directed by Marc Levin, describes the rise and fall of former New York City drug kingpin, Leroy (“Nicky”) Barnes. In the early 1970s, Barnes formed “The Council,” an organized crime syndicate that controlled a significant part of the heroin trade in Harlem. Inspired by the Italian-American mafia, Barnes became one of the most powerful and notorious figures in N...

This episode looks at two films about the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s: First They Killed My Father (dir. Angelina Jolie), and The Gate (or Les Temps des Aveux ) (dir. Régis Wargnier). First They Killed My Father is based on the memoir of Loung Ung, who was a five-year-old girl when the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in 1975. Loung Ung was forced to flee Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capita...