The Burial

Jamie Foxx is enormously charismatic and so commanding.

Foxx is almost giddy as the gospel spirited, gaudy-dressing, cliché-spewing attorney who is out of his league but fighting to the final verdict. Frankly this is the actor’s best performance since Ray.

A crowd pleaser that feels old school. Make no mistake though, without Foxx's grand and grandiose performance, this cinematic case would be easily dismissed.

A nuanced and intelligent legal drama that neatly combines big characters and big ideas. By focusing on wider issues of race and injustice, Betts finds continuing resonance in a case nearly 30 years old.

The movie may ping between social drama and IRL courtroom saga. Whenever Foxx struts and frets his two hours upon this stage, you realize that it may simply work best as a star vehicle.

The punchy performances, snappy script and exploration of a real world problem – people being milked dry when they are in mourning – make this an entertaining, thoughtful and at times humorous legal drama.

The Burial is far more successful as courtroom entertainment than as an investigation of corporate malfeasance... But it is good entertainment, and it’s exactly the sort of thing many of us wish Hollywood would make a dozen more of every year.

...a fairly generic yet mostly entertaining legal drama...

A stellar Jamie Foxx performance at the head, perfectly instilling a showboating ambulance-chasing huckster persona with deep-rooted insecurities that start to crack and a desire to do something greater.

Something extremely rare: a delightful, highly recommendable watch that also happens to be wise and troubling about large, complicated, important issues.