A preacher's certainty is the map, and some of them still do not get out.
The review
A liner turns over on New Year's Eve, and a reverend tells the survivors the way out is up, through the ship. A handful climb toward the hull. Some of them do not make it. His certainty is the plot. The disaster is the set, which is why people still put it on when they want size more than a story.
I would let a family watch and I would talk through it. Strangers have to trust a man who will not hedge, and the movie lets that sureness fail some of them. Say early that people die. Then talk about whom you would follow when every familiar door is wrong. Leave the size of the set for last.
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.
