

“Instead of people being like, ‘I’m going to see the latest Marvel movie,’ people were like, ‘I’m going to see the latest Denzel movie, the latest Julia movie, the latest Tom Cruise movie.’”

The international markets outside of Europe hadn’t really kicked in.” These movies about the American justice system, the intricacies of which might not resonate outside of the States, didn’t have to worry about appealing to a global crowd. In part, “it was really still a domestic business. “It hit almost all the boxes of what was working in Hollywood those days,” Ben Fritz, the author of The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, told me. Most of these are adaptations of John Grisham books and, as such, follow a similar formula: a young, idealistic lawyer from the South gets caught up in a conspiracy much bigger than they are, eventually persevering, but not before some nail-biting action and a rousing courtroom speech. Jackson, who killed two men to avenge his daughter’s rape), 1997’s The Rainmaker (Matt Damon takes down an evil insurance company), and so on. I burned through 1993’s The Firm (Tom Cruise joins a nefarious law firm connected to the mob), 1992’s A Few Good Men (Tom Cruise yells at Jack Nicholson in court), 1993’s The Pelican Brief (Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts team up to expose why two Supreme Court justices were assassinated), 1994’s The Client (Susan Sarandon helps a kid who gets ensnared in mob dealings), 1996’s A Time to Kill ( Matthew McConaughey defends Samuel L. It started with a bored rewatch of 1999’s Double Jeopardy, which was not what I would call “high quality” or even “legally sound in any way,” but there was a potent enough combination of nostalgia and easy streaming availability to keep me going. I had always considered these to be movies that dads watch while standing two feet away from the television screen-and they are, indeed, a subset of classic ‘90s dad thrillers.Īh, but we all become washed one day, my child. In life’s endless journey of self-discovery, I was surprised to learn this. Specifically, I can’t get enough of ‘90s legal thrillers. Though it was a biopic, Oppenheimer had managed to smuggle in one of my favorite genres: the legal thriller. By the time a clever young Senate aide played by Alden Ehrenreich smugly delivers the line, “the junior senator from Massachusetts, young guy, trying to make a name for himself … John F. Later, we witness a heart-pounding Senate confirmation hearing for his adversary, Lewis Strauss. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, where witnesses from his past are called in and grilled to a crisp.

There’s a tense, closed-door hearing about J.
JOHN GRISHAM WITNESS TO A TRIAL IN PAPERBACK MOVIE
During the third and final act of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster about the father of the atomic bomb, the movie dramatically shifts in tone.
