It’s fitting that the crowd-pleasing and enormously entertaining “The Burial” is set in the mid-1990s, as this fictionalized telling of a true-life landmark legal case is reminiscent of the courtroom dramas from the time, e.g., “A Few Good Men” (1992), “Philadelphia” (1993), “The Pelican Brief” (1993), “A Time to Kill” (1996), “Primal Fear” (1996), “The Rainmaker” (1997), et al.
This is the kind of movie where the spectators in the courtroom burst into applause after one particularly rousing piece of theater from a flamboyant attorney, where you know a surprise witness will be discovered just when all hope seems to be lost, where the lead counsel for the underdog client will engage in histrionics that would put him in contempt of court IRL — but the judge merely gives him a warning, telling him to “tread lightly” before proceeding with his confrontational and over-the-top style of questioning.
