Critics reviews

Leder has been most closely associated with crafting sturdy action and disaster films (Deep Impact remains an unsung highlight). But with her first feature in nearly a decade, she illuminates the action of language that is so crucial to Ginsburg’s brilliant long game approach to the law.  

Stiepleman’s script reduces everyone to a progressive-minded hero or a reactionary villain, and those who display any moral ambiguity eventually come around to the right side; for her part, director Mimi Leder (whose previous credits include the notoriously mawkish Pay It Forward and lots of series television) delivers this in the fashion of Steven Spielberg at his sentimental, self-righteous worst.

It’s not only the character’s self-confidence that falters there, but also the filmmakers’. Admiring as they are of their heroine’s courage and brilliance in challenging tradition and convention, they can’t help but enshroud her in biopic clichés.

The movie sacrifices character for intricate, and often fascinating, behind-the-scenes legal maneuvers, and emphasizes, above all, the role of social activism—brought home to the Ginsburgs by their teen-age daughter, Jane (Cailee Spaeny)—in judicial change.

This well-intentioned movie is a somewhat flawed one: its pace is a little slack, and sometimes it feels too predictably prepackaged. But Jones and Hammer keep the picture moving even through its shakier phases.