THE BURIAL

Here is the decision in full. This is a rousing, uplifting legal drama, and by our lights one of the year's best-produced, best-acted, best-written movies. Jamie Foxx gives his most electric performance since his Oscar-winning turn in RAY, playing a real-life black pastor and lawyer, Willie Gary. The story it tells is deeply Christian and pro-family: two married men of faith, one black and one white, become friends and crusade together for justice against a corporation that preyed on the poor.

But the film earns its caution. The language is excessive and gratuitous — at least 38 obscenities, a dozen of them "f" words, plus two profanities citing Jesus and some "n" words. That's a lot for a story this warm to carry, and it's why this one isn't for the whole family.

So: if you're an adult, or an older teen with a parent's blessing, and you can hear that language without harm to your conscience, this one's well worth your evening. If you're choosing for children, choose something else.

Mississippi, the mid-1990s. Willie Gary (Jamie Foxx) is a dynamic preacher and a showman of an attorney. Jeremiah "Jerry" O'Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), the elderly owner of an eight-location funeral home empire, watches Willie work a courtroom and knows he's found his man.

Jerry is cash-strapped and cornered. A large Canadian funeral home corporation offered to buy three of his homes — then let the signed deal languish for months. Smelling dirty dealing, Jerry decides to sue. Willie takes the case, insisting on being lead attorney over Jerry's longtime lawyer — and facing a ruthless opposing counsel who won't give an inch.

Four stars, and they're earned. This is a beautifully produced, superbly acted, sharply written film that holds you in fascination over a genuinely unusual kind of court battle. Foxx is the engine — all pizzazz when Willie works his magic in the courtroom — but the film has quieter gears too, letting Willie, Jerry, and their formidable opponent Mame Downes (Jurnee Smollett, in an equally award-worthy turn) each reveal the rough histories that drive them.

It could have been a heavy-handed screed about race, and it isn't. The film paints its characters with real nuance: Jerry's longtime attorney harbors low-key prejudice, yet proves to have complex, ultimately positive feelings. Nothing here plays as woke or preachy. What lingers is the friendship between Willie and Jerry — an inspiring rebuke to the racial conflicts swirling around them.

This is a strongly Christian, moral, pro-family film, and it wears those convictions naturally rather than as a lecture. Willie Gary is introduced as a preacher in a black Mississippi church, speaking of that church as a refuge from lingering prejudice. Both he and Jerry are married family men whose faith and strong marriages anchor the story. Their cause is justice for the poor — thousands of vulnerable black families defrauded by a mortuary chain at their moment of deepest grief — and the film's sympathies rest, fittingly, with an honest small businessman who wants to give his customers a fair deal.

The movie also handles race with grace instead of grievance. Set against the backdrop of the O.J. Simpson trial playing out on national television, it lets Willie and his opponent both prove themselves against the subtle prejudices around them — and it refuses to flatten anyone into a villain simply for being white. The friendship at its center is the film's quiet argument that reconciliation is possible.

Underneath the courtroom pyrotechnics runs a hunger for justice for those who cannot defend themselves — the very thing Scripture commands of God's people: "Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause" (Isaiah 1:17).

This is a superb film — brilliantly acted, warmly Christian, and built on a friendship worth cheering for. It also runs thick with foul language that puts it out of reach for younger viewers. So here's our answer, the same one we opened with: worth the trip — adults only. Looking for something the whole family can gather around instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.