A ’60s courtroom drama for dark times; sad, surreal Swedish vignettes; gay romance in the ’80s and more…

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 This Netflix project from writer-director Aaron Sorkin - creator of The West Wing and writer of The Social Network and Moneyball - has been in the works for a long time, but it could hardly feel more vital in the year of Black Lives Matter and US police brutality towards protestors. The Chicago 7 were a group from different factions who were placed on trial following demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. They were accused of conspiring to start a riot and placed on trial together, altogether many of them were previously unconnected - their number rising to eight with the addition of Black Panthers founder Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who at one point was ordered to be bound and gagged by authoritarian judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella, magisterially chilling). In this sober, informative and altogether old-fashioned piece (you can tell that it was once intended as a project for Steven Spielberg), Sorkin mobilises his expertise with that venerable genre the courtroom drama, which is where he started as a writer in 1994’s A Few Good Men.

Sorkin’s film has a sometimes creaky antique feel befitting the form, depending as it does on sudden legal breakthroughs, tense confrontations and a resounding, cathartic moment of glory. It also rides significantly on its raft of prestige performances - including a magnificently testy Mark Rylance as defence counsel William Kunstler, an unprecedently mature and restrained Eddie Redmayne as student leader Tom Hayden, and a terrific Sacha Baron Cohen as Yippie mainstay Abbie Hoffman - the most serious you’ve ever seen him, but with a mile-wide streak of wiseacre provocation. This is a film about the ’60s that could almost have been made in the ’50s at the height of the courtroom cycle - but nevertheless it is expertly crafted and highly watchable, and makes for a very digestible history lesson if you want background on a nexus of deeply entrenched American sociopolitical problems that show no immediate signs of going away.