A child who will not stop searching for her mother. The comedy is in the way.
The review
Tip's mother is taken in an alien relocation and Tip does not adjust. She goes. Oh is a coward from a culture of cheerful conformity, and the film thinks courage is catching. The Boov are comic invaders. The girl is not comic. That imbalance is the film's integrity.
It is bright and a bit frantic. Under it: do not relocate a family and call it help. Do not leave a child to be reasonable about a missing mother.
Adults. The courtroom is the work. What happened and what can be proved are not the same fact.
The review
A soldier shoots a bar owner and says the man raped his wife. A former prosecutor who now fishes more than he practices takes the defense. I am not going to describe the testimony. In 1959 the testimony itself was the scandal, because a courtroom in an American film was asked to say out loud what a trial of this kind has to say. The lawyer is good at the saying. He is also having a good time, and the film lets you see the good time, which is the correction inside the craft.
Adults. A house does not need this as a primer. A house that wants one picture of how a verdict is made, rather than how a villain confesses, can use it. Ask, at the end, what the jury was allowed to know and what the rooms already knew. Those are different piles. The decade's more famous courtroom hours snap the case shut with a witness who breaks. This one is more honest about the gap, and less honest about whether the lawyer is a man to admire. Admire the proceeding. Decline the grin.
