Before and After (1996)

When their teenage son is suspected of murder, Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson, as the boy's parents, must grapple with small-town police friends, lawyers, vigilantes, and their own feelings of culpability over covering up the crime, in Barbet Schroeder's earnest but a touch too pat adaptation of Rosellen Brown's book.

★★★☆☆

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Last Suspect (2023)

A laughable cliche of a high-powered, ultra-successful criminal lawyer - she never loses a case - and a laughable cliche of a loose-wire cop - the sort who shoots first and shows no respect to the station chief - team up in a watchable but patently absurd thriller that grows increasingly ridiculous as it goes on - the lawyer's daughter is kidnapped for an unusual ransom, with the lawyer coerced into reinvestigating and solving a murder before the young man found guilty of the crime is sentenced.

★★☆☆☆

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Guilty As Sin (1993)

You can tell how good a lawyer Rebecca De Mornay's Jennifer Haines is by the way she swaggers around a courtroom and drapes herself in the desk chairs of sleek 90s-minimalist law offices, but a new client played by Don Johnson is a real ladykiller - she thinks literally so - and knows just how to crack Jennifer's cocky lawyer facade, so soon she is making the worst decisions of her legal career, in Sidney Lumet's charmless but perfectly watchable legal thriller marketed disingenuously as erotic.

★★★☆☆

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