courtroom drama

The Paradine Case (1947)

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The Paradine Case is often considered a lesser Alfred Hitchcock picture. The director himself practically disowned the completed product, which was heavily interfered with by producer (and screenwriter) David O. Selznick, who had produced Hitch’s first Hollywood film, Rebecca, and had Hitchcock under contract for the next seven years, which ended with the difficult production of this picture. It was also a financial failure, recouping only half of its budget. It’s mostly left out of the conversation of the director’s successes, but The Paradine Case, despite lacking some of the more exciting features of Hitchcock’s work, proves that even when the man was half-assing it (and fighting the execs), he could still make a damn fine feature. 

The film opens in London with the arrest of beautiful widow Maddalena Anna Paradine (Alida Valli, who would later appear as Miss Tanner in Suspiria) on suspicion of poisoning her husband, a wealthy, blind, retired colonel. The family lawyer, Sir Simon (Charles Coburn), enlists defense attorney Tony Keane (Gregory Peck in his second and final Hitchcock collaboration following Spellbound) to represent her in the Crown’s case against her. Sir Simon’s clever daughter Judy (Joan Tetzel) also happens to be best friends with Tony’s wife Gay (Ann Todd), but Simon insists that his selection of Keane has everything to do with providing the best counsel for Mrs. Paradine, although he admits that Keane has a tendency to lean more on playing to jurors’ sympathies than practicing purely legalistic law. With regards to Keane’s weakness, Sir Simon warns him that he won’t be able to pull off his normal emotional appeals if they happen to argue the case before Judge Thomas Horfield (Charles Laughton, who had previously appeared in the director’s Jamaica Inn and would later go on to direct Night of the Hunter). At a dinner at the Hortfields’, the judge reveals himself to be an utter cad, belittling his wife, the Lady Sophie (Ethel Barrymore), taunting Keane about his upcoming defense, and sexually harassing Gay when the others aren’t looking. 

Matters become complicated when Keane and Mrs. Paradine, despite the latter’s professed love for her late husband and the former’s heretofore happy marriage, find themselves drawn to one another romantically while working on her case. As rumors begin to spread, Gay’s concerns about her husband’s potential for infidelity bloom, and although Keane offers to give up the case, she can see that asking him to do so would only make the tension worse and so spurs him on to see the case through to its end and save Mrs. Paradine from conviction. Keane latches onto the idea of convincing the jury that Colonel Paradine took his own life and goes so far as to suggest that suspicion be diverted to the late colonel’s valet, a French-Canadian man named André Latour (Louis Jourdan), for assisting in said suicide, but Mrs. Paradine refuses to allow Keane to involve him. Convinced of his client’s innocence and desperate for something that might exonerate her, Keane goes to the Paradines’ country estate, where he learns that Latour is still in residence, and is somewhat shocked to find that the man’s room is on the same hallway as the separate suites of both the mistress and the late master of the house, rather than residing in the servants’ quarters. He attempts to make contact with Latour by posing as someone simply looking to rent the house, but Latour evades him, only to come to his inn later that night and tell him that Mrs. Paradine cannot be trusted. Keane refuses to believe this, and returns to London, where he goes to the prison to visit Mrs. Paradine before going home and checking in with his wife. 

The film is essentially bifurcated right down the middle between Keane’s playing detective and the trial of Mrs. Paradine, with the audience heading into the trial without a clear idea of whether or not the accused is guilty of killing her husband. Old Hitchcock stalwart Leo G. Carroll appears for his fourth of sixth collaborations with the director as prosecuting counsel Sir Joseph, and although he only appears in the back half, he leaves quite an impression, and the repartee between the somewhat showboaty Keane, his more staid counterpart on the other side of the courtroom, and Lord Horfield, who does end up presiding over the Paradine trial, is quite a lot of fun to watch. As secrets are revealed over the course of several days of trial, the whole thing unravels, and by the end, Keane is a broken man, uncertain about his future. 

I’m not sure why this didn’t connect with contemporary audiences. In his movie guide, Leonard Maltin wrote of the film that it was “talk, talk, talk in complicated, stagy courtroom drama,” and a more contemporary review from The Nation’s James Agee in 1948 called Paradine Case “the wordiest script since the death of [18th Century ‘father of conservatism’] Edmund Burke.” Courtroom dramas were nothing new at this point, so I’m not entirely certain what could be expected otherwise, and the cheeky dialogue between the three verbal combatants in the courtroom is often much more wickedly funny than either of the aforementioned critics gave it credit for. Like Sam Waterston, Gregory Peck is one of those actors who was born to play a lawyer, and this film was made at the height of his marketability as a star; he got his third Best Actor nomination for Gentleman’s Agreement the same year that The Paradine Case was released, although he wouldn’t win until his fifth nom, for To Kill a Mockingbird. He gets to play a wide range here, from the confident barrister who thinks he can win any case, to a man who’s guilty about the emotional affair he’s fallen into, to an infuriated defender of a woman’s besmirched honor, and finally a determined man driven to excessive rhetoric while trying to save a woman from being hanged. He’s doing excellent work, and it’s a shame that this performance has fallen through the cracks as the film’s overall reputation has remained middling. 

Outside of Peck, the film largely revolves around the performances of Todd, Valli, and Tetzel, who are likewise excellent. Todd manages to invest Gay, who is clearly the less exciting character of the two women between whom Keane finds himself torn, with a lot of pathos. Her standout scene is one in which she acknowledges to her husband that she isn’t happy with the way things are going, but that she would rather Mrs. Paradine get the best possible defense, which she knows Keane is best suited to provide, than let her be sentenced to death and ascend to the point of becoming Keane’s lost Lenore. As she says, it will be easier to fight a free woman for her husband than the woman’s unimpeachable ghost. Valli does great work playing both sides of Mrs. Paradine; she freely admits that her life before she met the colonel was one in which she supported herself by latching onto wealthy men, but that when she met Paradine, she decided she could “be his eyes.” She convinces Keane that her love for the late colonel was genuine, but Valli gives Mrs. Paradine just enough ambiguity to make us wonder if she’s more cold and calculating than she appears, especially after Latour delivers his warning to Keane. Overall, however, I was most taken with Joan Tetzel, whose Judy is, despite being very much a supporting character, connected to all of the events and serves the important purpose of explaining the implications of the various court proceedings to Gay, and thus to us. The relationship between Judy and her father, Sir Simon, was quite an endearing one, with several scenes in which it’s apparent that the old man is consternated by his daughter because she’s already as clever and observant as he is and will only become more so with time. She reaches the same conclusions that he does even as he professes something else entirely, and it’s fun to watch him become flustered that his daughter is just like him. Even as he pontificates that her behavior is unladylike, you can tell that he’s having the time of his life having raised a daughter that he can spar with. Ultimately, the duo serves as the stable, warm heart that helps anchor the film while Keane’s wandering affection affects everything else. 

As previously mentioned, this film is lacking some of Hitchcock’s trademark touches. The Paradine Case does not include any major spectacles or showdowns on or around exciting landmarks, unless one counts the trial itself and its location in an exact duplicate of a real courtroom in London’s Old Bailey. The set took nearly three months to complete and cost $80K (approximately a whopping $1.2M adjusted for inflation), and, since so many of the scenes filmed there would be shot at low angles, it included a ceiling. This no doubt was a technical and logistical nightmare, but even in these circumstances, Hitch was trying something new by running up to four cameras in different locations with each take, which (according to a now-dead link on the film’s Wikipedia page) served as trial runs for Rope and Under Capricorn. It’s not always effective. In many scenes in which Keane is speaking to the court, Sir Simon and another man are sitting in front of him, and it appears that they were superimposed into the shot, which is rather distracting. There are some other attempts at tricky camera work that don’t succeed, with the worst composition being the moment when Latour first enters the courtroom and the camera keeps Mrs. Paradine’s in center frame while it rotates to follow Latour’s entire walk around the cell in which she’s seated. As with Sir Simon, this is portrayed through superimposition of one image on the other, capturing a similar effect to a split diopter shot, but messier and uglier. 

That isn’t to say that there isn’t beautiful filmic storytelling or composition throughout. Although they’re as brief as they are pointless, we get several gorgeous shots of the English countryside when Keane visits the Paradine country home. Once he arrives, Latour’s face is kept in shadow for his entire introduction, and after that he is still seen only at a distance or otherwise unclearly for the entire time that Keane is present, fully revealing himself only when he confronts Keane at the latter’s inn. In that scene, the light fixture in the room, which features several dangling crystals like metaphorical swords waiting to fall, is always framed over Keane’s head. Several scenes find characters facing each other from one or the other side of a set of bars, whether they be the literal ones at the prison in which Mrs. Paradine is incarcerated or various room dividers or lattices. It’s not the most exciting camera work, but it rises far above being merely functional. 

One of the advantages that we have over the contemporary audience is that we have the director’s entire oeuvre to dissect and analyze while they did not. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the pushback at the time, in addition to a lack of confidence in the film from the general public as a result of behind-the-scenes squabbling, was that this is another one of Hitchcock’s forays into the psychosexual, pushing the envelope to see what he can get away with. Keane’s fascination with Mrs. Paradine seems to be at least somewhat stoked by her inaccessibility to him; they never have a moment of true privacy, as every meeting they hold to discuss her defense is in full view of a watchful guard. There’s some intersection of withholding and voyeurism there that deserves to be unpacked by someone who’s better versed in either of those prurient interests than I. When Keane goes to the country estate, he makes his way into Mrs. Paradine’s room, with the housekeeper apologizing for the mess, noting that she was in the process of packing the lady of the house’s things. Inside, Keane finds an intricately carved headboard with an inlaid portrait of the woman herself, and the soundtrack throws in a scare chord when the tracking shot that represents his perspective lands on an open case of her undergarments. Keane grows so uncomfortable that he has to move to a position where the portrait can’t see him. Following dinner at the Hortfields’, when the men in attendance emerge from the dining room after the requisite men’s only, cigar-smoking time, Lord Hortfield is so utterly overwhelmed by the sight of Gay’s bare shoulder that he immediately moves in to sit too close to her on the sofa and move her hand to his thigh under the pretense of admiring a piece of her jewelry. It almost feels like a set-up to have him be more antagonistic to Keane in the trial segment that is to come later, but it’s quickly glossed over instead and makes no reappearance as a plot driver in the second half. Maybe that plot thread was continued in the copious lost footage (the rough cut was three hours long, while the only extant version is 114 minutes), but there’s no way we can ever know. What we do know is that this film has a fair amount of grappling with one’s (and others’) raging sexuality that did make it to the final cut, and it might have been alienating to an audience that didn’t have decades of the director’s work to slot this into as a recurring creative fascination. All in all, however, I think a modern audience will find much more to enjoy here than the film’s reputation might imply. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Coyote vs. Acme (2026)

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I’ve been going through a Marx Bros phase for the past week or so, which again has me thinking about how many Old Hollywood icons & archetypes were introduced to me via Looney Tunes as a child, long before I would’ve been exposed to their originating sources of inspiration. The wisecracking Groucho Marx is, of course, Bugs Bunny in human form. Bugs also borrowed his trademark carrot-munching technique from Clark Gable and would occasionally dip into Humphrey Bogart parody, in addition to his more overt Marxisms. Caricatures of Frank Sinatra, James Cagney, Cary Grant and Mice & Men-era Lon Chaney Jr. would frequently pop up in Looney Tunes shorts as well, as would, most famously, a beautifully warped caricature of Peter Lorre. There’s something especially subversive about Saturday morning cartoons exposing young children to Peter Lorre long before they’d have any personal interest in seeking out his iconic villain roles in M, Mad Love, The Maltese Falcon, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and titles otherwise alphabetized. Once Lorre was introduced as an in-universe character among other Old Hollywood celebrities, Looney Tunes animators had a ton of fun slapping his distinct mug on a wide range of characters: a Casablancan Tweety Bird, a fish with disconcertingly fleshy lips, and a mad scientist named Dr. Lorre, whom I was happy to discover plays a major role in the latest Looney Tunes feature Coyote vs. Acme, continuing the tradition into a new millennium.

Dr. Lorre serves as the Maltese Falcon-like MacGuffin of Coyote vs. Acme, a missing scientist who was violently disappeared by the insidious Acme corporation in a covert coverup effort. Finding Dr. Lorre means uncovering Acme’s crimes against the cartoon citizens who purchase its products, treating them like disposable animal test subjects despite their overt anthropomorphisms. The corporation’s most frequent victim, of course, is Wile E. Coyote, who is addicted to purchasing & deploying faulty Acme products in his deranged, single-minded pursuit to capture & devour the Road Runner. Sick of all the backfiring rockets, misleading magnets, and trickster dynamite fuses that have mangled his body over the decades, Wile E. Coyote finally decides to sue Acme for personal damages, employing an overwhelmed underachiever lawyer to plead his case, as portrayed by a live & in-the-flesh Will Forte. While researching Acme’s culpability in the cartoon coyote’s never-ending marathon of Sisyphean failures, Forte’s personal injury law firm accidentally undercovers a larger corporate conspiracy involving Dr. Lorre’s disappearance and the second-class citizen treatment of all toons everywhere. The resulting fight for truth & justice makes for the goofiest X-Files conspiracy thriller sendup since Disclosure Day, with Bugs Bunny putting in a crucial cameo appearance as the firm’s shadowy Deep Throat informant (in another classic movie reference to All the President’s Men, which was similarly parodied by fellow introducing-the-kids-to-the-classics cartoon series The Simpsons).

While Coyote vs. Acme goes out of its way to continue the Looney Tunes shorts’ caricatural celebrations of classic Hollywood iconography, it’s clear that Hollywood does not love the movie back. The film’s years-long struggles to reach theatrical distribution has been oddly storied & public. The initial blow was an announcement that Warner Bros was going to scrap the completed picture entirely, finding more value in recategorizing it as a tax write-off than in marketing it as populist entertainment. The upstart indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment then came to the rescue, buying the film out of oblivion so it can enjoy a full life outside a cyclical tax audit. That extratextual backstory is only relevant, really, because Coyote vs. Acme happens to be about shady corporate machinations that value profits over people, so that when Will Forte and his coyote client take Acme to court, it plays as if Warner Bros is also on trial for its crimes against its own IP. Screenwriter Samy Burch (May December) finds great inspiration & pathos in Wile E. Coyote’s stubborn persistence while taking on both Acme in court and the Road Runner on the road despite his repeated, hopeless failures, which brings the twinkle back to his schmuck lawyer’s long-dead eyes. It’s something worth keeping in mind if and when reports of the movie’s box office disappointments hit national headlines; just getting the picture out to the public is a victory in itself, regardless of the result.

As admirable as I find Coyote vs. Acme‘s anti-corporate sentiments, and as charming as I find its classically minded participation in conspiracy thriller tropes, it’s difficult to claim that the movie ever rises above being, simply, cute. The jokes are consistently cute but never convincingly zany, with even Wile E. Coyote’s classic comedy-duo partnership with the Road Runner transitioning from violent to cute. Will Forte’s admiring relationship with his Sisyphean client is cute but never believably real nor tangible. Decades after Who Framed Roger Rabbit? mastered the form, there has yet to be another human-cartoon team up where the drawn & photographed characters share a physical space with the same movie-magic credibility. The textureless flatness of Coyote vs. Acme‘s computer animation does it no favors in that effort, nor does the choice to team Forte up with a mute character who can only communicate through exasperated grimaces & hand-written signs. We’re always aware that we’re watching a human actor speaking to no one but the camera, with his imaginary costar added later in post. More damningly, the film also struggles to replicate the madcap momentum of classic Looney Tunes shorts in its more stoic, procedural courtroom drama plotting. Just last year, Ketchup Entertainment distributed a much zanier, much more classically loony Looney Tunes revival in the fully animated The Day the Earth Blew Up, proving that it can still be done and making this secondary effort to keep the brand alive feel somewhat superfluous. It’s difficult to get too fired up about Coyote vs. Acme’s glaring shortcomings, though, since its very existence is an artistic fight against corporate greed and its overall effect is, not for nothing, cute.

-Brandon Ledet

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

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1956’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a late-career noir directed by Fritz Lang, his very last production for an American studio. It’s weirdly flat in style for Lang, whose early triumphs M & Metropolois helped establish foundational cinematic language that pushed the still-young artform to its furthest extremes. Here, he’s so bored with the form that he goes through the motions of a legal procedural as if he were making a televised Movie of the Week, give or take a few lateral camera maneuvers that attempt to liven up long scenes of men talking at desks & tables. Lang even calls attention to this TV-movie quality by speeding along witness testimony in montage as presented on a local news broadcast, shot in the same multi-camera style as the film proper. However, the longer you stick with Beyond a Reasonable Doubt‘s preposterous, only-in-the-movies courtroom drama the more complicated its moral & narrative implications become, until it spirals out into a big-picture indictment of the entire American justice system and then, ultimately, lands a few unexpected jabs as a twist-a-minute thriller. What I’m getting at here is that it’s Fritz Lang’s Juror #2.

Dana Andrews (of Laura fame) stars as a hotshot novelist who’s eager to score a big hit with his second book so he can afford a high-society marriage to his newspaper heiress fiancée (Joan Fontaine, of Rebecca fame). His best lead is a hairbrained idea cooked up by his father-in-law-to-be, a newspaper man who’s in constant public battle with the local DA over the ethics of capital punishment. Incensed that the DA is “trying to reach the governor’s chair over the bodies of executed men,” the father-in-law schemes to trick the aspiring politician into sentencing a provably innocent man to death based on planted, circumstantial evidence. Convinced that the scheme has the potential for national publicity, the novelist foolishly agrees to frame himself for the murder of a burlesque dancer, hoping to turn the experience into his next hit book (and, why not, make a political statement against capital punishment too, if it’s convenient enough). As anyone who’s ever seen a movie before would guess, things go awry when the evidence proving his innocence is destroyed, and his fated date with an electric chair becomes more inevitable than theoretical.

It’s how Douglas Morrow’s script disappears that exonerating evidence and what happens to the novelist once it’s gone that makes Beyond a Reasonable Doubt narratively tricky. The 80-minute potboiler doesn’t fully get cooking until the final quarter, when Morrow throws in at least one twist too many and the pot boils over. The first twist is a violent shock. The second is a disappointingly conventional cop-out that defuses the tension. Then, the third twist desperately attempts to add some traditional thriller tension back into the plot, calling the movie’s morals & politics into question in a way that can’t fully be reconciled because it happens at the very last moment. At the start, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a thought experiment cooked up by noble writers who aim to take down wicked politicians who use state-sanctioned murder to further their careers. Since the objectively evil practice of capital punishment is still alive & well today (with Louisiana & other states gassing prisoners and subjecting them to firing squads again), maybe it’s to the movie’s benefit that it ends as a cheap-thrills mystery plot instead. Lang & Morrow made no detectable impact on the American justice system, but they did pull a few gasps out of an unsuspecting audience, even if entirely out of incredulity. Like with Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2, I doubt it would’ve been notable to anyone if it were filed under a workman director’s name instead of Lang’s, but there is something to its moral precarity that can’t be fully dismissed.

-Brandon Ledet

The Seven Minutes (1971)

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fourstar

“The sex film? I think it’s on the way out. I want to get into horror films. Suspense, mystery.” -Russ Meyer

Russ Meyer may have been done with sexploitation (if you believe that for a second) but the bosoms weren’t done with him. The director’s follow up to his camp masterpiece Beyond the Valley of the Dolls may have pretended to be a straight-laced courtroom drama, but The Seven Minutes was just as plagued with Russ’ sexual id as any of his nastier works. Reportedly, Fox Studios took the opposite approach to its hands-off policy with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls & pressured Meyer into not only adopting this specific property (an Irving Wallace novel) for the screen, but also demanding that the film achieve an R-rating from the MPAA, perhaps as a reaction to the sting of the studio’s X-rated disaster Myra Breckinridge. High octane Meyer works like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls & Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! had established a certain maniacal standard for the director’s work that The Seven Minutes demonstrates little-to-no desire to fulfill. Still, I find that the negative reaction to The Seven Minutes was largely unwarranted. It was far from Meyer’s most personal picture, but I found it to be more enjoyable than a majority of his catalog, much to my surprise.

Despite how subdued The Seven Minutes may come across at first glance, it actually commanded twice the budget of Meyer’s previous big studio effort & the director’s all-time longest runtime. There’s no doubt that the director initially intended the film to be his grandest work, his once chance to be taken seriously. So, where did he choose to set his sights for his major studio manifesto? Now on top of the world (in terms of ticket sales, anyway; most critics still scoffed at him), Meyer gloatingly fired back at the censorship boards & moral policing that plagued the theater run of his otherwise-successful film Vixen! just three years earlier. The Seven Minutes (named for the average time it takes for a woman to achieve orgasm), revolves around a courtroom battle in which an oversensitive moral vanguard attempts to convict a sexually-oriented novel guilty for the rape of a young college student by providing “living proof that a dirty book can destroy a  clean boy.” Of course, Meyer’s tirade stands firmly on the other side of the issue, railing against the hypocritical piety of the prosecutors looking to condemn this piece of fictional smut and, by extension, condemning the work of Russ Meyer himself. In a lot of ways The Seven Minutes is a highly paranoid piece of art, one that thumbs its nose at the extensive past of Meyer detractors in a grandly expensive display of gloating.

Solidifying the film’s straw man argument against the freedom of expression of sexual liberation in art, The Seven Minutes openly mocks the fictional Strength Through Decency League. One of the best stretches of dialogue in the film is the following rant at one of the STDL’s political rallies; “There is virtually no area that remains untainted by the quick buck artists who pander to our lowest forms of taste, and the public be damned. Just the other evening, my first night off in weeks, I decided to take my wife Mary & our three children to the movies. In our neighborhood, we had such subject material as rape, lust, motorcycle gangs, homosexuals, lesbians, drug abuse, you name it. Whatever happened to the movies we used to be able to take our children to?” What’s so great about this speech is that it not only jokingly jabs at the exact smut Meyer had himself been peddling for over a decade, but it also serves as a distinct antithesis to the anti-censorship rant that opens Meyer’s Cherry, Harry, and Raquel!. Meyer never forgave the goody two shoes who complicated his otherwise-successful run with Vixen! He wasn’t satisfied with protesting them at the beginning of his modest indie movie Cherry, but waited to use the big time stage of his second major studio release to portray censorship-happy do-gooders as two-faced monsters who pretend to be “protecting the public”, but behind closed doors are hoarding pornography for themselves while maintaining a holier-than-thou public persona.

This aspect of The Seven Minutes positions the film as a personal work for Meyer, even if his personal interest in the work is centered mostly on a vicious pettiness. It’s not the only thing that distinguishes the film as a uniquely Meyer work, though. Old Meyer standbys like Charles Napier, Stuart Lancaster, and Uschi Digard appear in the film, as do old-hat Meyer tropes like themes of male sexual inadequacy and the idea that heterosexual romance is a form of emotional pugilism, an antagonistic back & forth  seeped much more in vitriol than sexuality. Perhaps the best metaphor for what the film accomplishes can be found in the character Babydoll, played by Shawn Devereaux. As rooms full of law men argue about decency & censorship, Babydoll undulates like the go-go dancers of yesteryear, purring like a high-pitched kitten, blaring hip dance music, and trying to make innocuous acts like eating potato chips the most seductive transgressions imaginable. When her lecherous, lawmaking cohorts bark commands like, “Babydoll, shut off that damn radio!” the push & pull between Meyer’s natural absurdity & the studio’s forced browbeating can be felt in full effect.

The difference between my reaction to The Seven Minutes & that of the film’s contemporaries is that I find that compromised dichotomy fascinating, while critical publications like Playboy Magazine called it “a losing battle of mind over mattress.” In short, The Seven Minutes featured a lot of dudes talking & not a lot of boobs bouncing, something that couldn’t be saved by Meyer’s trademark rapid-fire edits or lip service paid to the virtues of smut in the eyes of the film’s contemporary audience. The critics & the box office returns had their way with the film, making sure that it stood as the very last major studio production that Meyer saw to completion.

Although I’d sympathise with the idea that The Seven Minutes‘ courtroom procedures & undercover police work aren’t as interesting in the abstract as Meyer’s feverish nudie pictures could be, I still stand by the film’s quality as a finished product. I think that being the very first Russ Meyer film that couldn’t be read as a campy trifle may have clashed harshly with what people had come to expect from the director, resulting in a vicious reaction to a decent film that didn’t deserve to be met with such an easy dismissal. Meyer himself had even distanced himself from The Seven Minutes in the end, blaming a lot of the film’s shortcomings on the studio’s oppressive influence. I’m willing to chalk that reaction up to wounded pride resulting from the film’s hurtful reception, though, as The Seven Minutes reads as far too distinctly personal for me to dismiss it outright.

-Brandon Ledet