| Netflix | Release Date: September 25, 2020 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
43
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Sep 24, 2020
Certain events are rearranged from the factual timelines, and yes, The Trial of the Chicago 7 exercises poetic license. This is not a documentary; it’s a dramatization of events that resonates with great power while containing essential truths, and it’s one of the best movies of the year.
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Sep 24, 2020
Since theaters basically ceased to exist, there’s been a few movies I’ve watched screeners at home and have really, really enjoyed. But this is the first that made me feel like I was back in a theater. This felt like a real event. That I got those chills down the back as I watched something I’m just loving for the first time of what will be many times.
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Sep 24, 2020
Sorkin takes a rather dense, complicated court case—one peopled with figures who clung to stubborn differences even in the context of their shared ideals—and keeps it aloft every minute, as if he were following the aerodynamic principles of hang-gliding rather than moviemaking. Best of all, he brings out the best each actor in this enormous ensemble cast has to offer; every character is rendered with jewelers-loupe clarity.
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Oct 19, 2020
As in any Sorkin joint there are at least three lines of dialogue that might make your eyes roll into the back of your head and your body produce an involuntary groan so extended that you will likely have to rewind. But it just goes to show how good the rest of it is that a few clunkers could stick out that much.
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Oct 2, 2020
His characters are the brightest, slickest people you will ever meet, and whether you’re meant to love or loathe them, Sorkin has a genuine talent for ensuring his heroes and villains will forever stick in your head, wandering the recesses of your mind in an eternal walk-and-talk formation.
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Sep 25, 2020
Briskly paced, bristling with Sorkin’s distinctive verbal fusillades, seamlessly blending conventional courtroom procedural with protest reenactments and documentary footage (including Wexler’s), The Trial of the Chicago 7 offers an absorbing primer in a chapter of American history that was both bizarre and ruefully meaningful.
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Oct 14, 2020
It advances no cutting-edge ideas and pushes no cinematic boundaries. But watching it at a moment when the majority of the population is moving leftward while our institutions are held hostage by a far-right minority — and when police violence continues, unchecked and unprosecuted, in the streets — provides the vicarious pleasure of watching a bunch of hyperarticulate progressives speak truth to power, and it feels pretty damn good, even if they do all talk a lot like Aaron Sorkin.
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Oct 8, 2020
It all comes back to Sorkin's core idea, implicitly and expertly expressed: that the tactic of violence and provocation, then making the victims seem like thugs, is still performed in Portland and St. Louis and New York, just as it was in Chicago. It's also a reminder that there was no Chicago 7 until the establishment brought them together.
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Oct 12, 2020
Sep 24, 2020
"Trial” is so inherently compelling — and so directly germane to an America where the government labels cities “anarchist jurisdictions” and states are drawing up laws against free assembly — that it doesn’t need the frills. Let the kids know what happened the way it happened. They can handle the truth.
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Sep 24, 2020
Sorkin’s writing may be better served by a director who can bring a new set of perspectives and dynamics to the work, rather than simply presenting them head-on. Yet it works anyway. The actors win on appeal. And it’s always worth revisiting this particular chapter of Chicago unrest and injustice, because that chapter, tragically, is always up for another rewrite.
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IndieWireSep 24, 2020
Oct 15, 2020
The Trial of the Chicago 7 feels timely in an at-times jolting way, with images of chaos in the streets and angry crowds chanting "The whole world is watching." At its core, though, writer-director Aaron Sorkin takes the "trial" part to heart, leading to a largely courtroom-bound affair that -- while entertaining and splendidly cast -- at its best echoes his early triumph with "A Few Good Men."
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Sep 26, 2020
This film is one of those exhilarating instances when Sorkin finds a context in which all of his well-established impulses that can be so annoying elsewhere — the self-righteousness, the straw men, the great men, the men who aren’t onstage but are nevertheless digging deep in their diaphragms to deliver their lines to the back row — actually work.
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Sep 25, 2020
Despite Sorkin’s significant shortcomings as a director, The Trial of the Chicago 7 hums along mightily on the strength of its god-tier ensemble and whip-smart script. There’s hardly a false note in the cast, all of them capably handling Sorkin’s overlapping, erudite dialogue with aplomb, and many of the big moments land with a splash.
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The PlaylistSep 24, 2020
While many will draw parallels between scenes involving civil unrest to the events of 2020, the philosophical differences between Hayden and Abbie — cultural versus electoral revolution, respectively — ring closely to the debates raging within progressive politics today, and actually prove more interesting.
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Sep 24, 2020
The Trial Of The Chicago 7 wants to bottle the revolutionary spirit of its setting—the take-to-the-streets idealism of the ’60s—but its snappy montage-glimpses of demonstrations verge on costume-party kitsch. The movie is at its best and most persuasive in the courtroom, when Sorkin can draw on the clashes of ideology and personality.
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The Film StageSep 25, 2020
Sorkin doesn’t face these evils for more than a moment at a time. He doesn’t even try to convert the uninitiated, but his movie thinks it does. His script and direction gaze rather than observe, and by the time the score swells and the requisite title cards inform the viewer of its leads’ fates, The Trial of the Chicago 7 has brought virtually nothing to light.
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The GuardianSep 24, 2020
He [Sorkin] can also become fantastically ponderous, bloated with finger-waggingly self-important liberal patriotism. Sadly, that is the tone with this exasperatingly dull, dramatically inert and faintly misjudged re-creation of the “Chicago Seven” trial in the US, which Sorkin has written and directed.
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