this is not a documentary; it's a dramatization of events that resonates with great power while containing essential truths, and it's one of the best movies of the year
in his powerful and timely second feature.. Aaron Sorkin has made a movie that's gripping, illuminating and trenchant, as erudite as his best work and always grounded first and foremost in story and character
Aaron Sorkin's counterculture docudrama is a knockout; "The Trial of the Chicago 7" is the rare drama about the 1960s that's powerful and authentic and moving enough to feel as if it were taking place today
Aaron Sorkin's "The Trial of the Chicago 7" is timely and unexpectedly fun; The film, an all-star ensemble, is many things: exciting, entertaining, inspiring, infuriating, brash, buoyant
Aaron Sorkin is at his most portentous with this inert film, stuffed with stars, which mislocates the point of the trial it dramatises; [an] exasperatingly dull, dramatically inert and faintly misjudged re-creation of the "Chicago Seven" trial in the US
a remarkably relevant story, smartly told, but with certain blind spots and pitfalls: broad strokes, rhetorical grandstanding, the tendency to overstuff an already load-bearing tale
a look back at rabble-rousers from another era won't change the world, but "Chicago 7" is a solid tribute to a few men who realized they could, even when the system they fought for came up short
"The Trial of the Chicago 7" works as both immensely watchable entertainment and a cautionary tale queasily relevant to 2020 -- when it's not stooping to the kind of slick, desk-pounding melodrama that has become a Sorkin specialty
by Richard Roeper [Chicago Sun-Times ]
by Bill Goodykoontz [Arizona Republic ]
by Peter Bradshaw [The Guardian ]
by Ty Burr [Boston Globe ]
