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The twice Oscar nominated The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a Netflix courtroom drama that brings together a cast of some young up and coming Hollywood stars. The film is set in 1968 and 1969, during the real-life eponymous trial of seven leftist defendants in Chicago for protesting the Vietnam war. The film kicks off with Nixon’s justice department charging these individuals — a ragtag collection of leftist organizers, most of whom aren’t connected by anything but their beliefs — with federal crimes of conspiracy and dissent. The powerhouse cast includes Eddie Redmayne and Alex Sharp as intellectual idealist students who believe that you can only change the system from within, Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong as counterculture yippies who only believe in change through the destruction of the system, John Carroll Lynch as a radical pacifist, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen as the national chairman of the Black Panther Party. It might feel a little too polished for a docudrama, and has caught a little bit of flack by its harshest critics for reducing a hallmark of systemic and politically-motivated injustice to a battle of Who Has the Best One-liner, but it is undoubtedly a grossly engaging depiction of a broken and corrupt justice system, released at a time where judicial miscarriages in the US were in the spotlight.

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