Pretty average white guilt apologetic piece of cinema

Rating: 6/10 (28 December 2016)

It's a good film in that it's got content, that is well executed, by strong acting throughout, and a good moral at the center of it.
It's overrated in that it's really not a brilliant film but was one of the first big films that put the oppression of the American black man in the foreground of the plot, with a very strong emphasis on the injustice of racial discrimination. Most of the film's strength, the thing most people will remember, is that scene at the trial of the black worker. But there isn't in fact anything cinematically exceptional about that scene, or anything else here for that matter.
It's slightly untidy as well, and a bit disjointed. As the film starts it seems we'll the protagonists will be the group of children which we closely follow the adventures of, until a drastic change in atmosphere occurs as we're plunged right into the trial's guts; and it seems the momentum built in one area of the film goes silent for a new one to take rise, and so on; the dynamics are on alternative current. Just take the film's very title and tagline: 'to kill a mocking bird'. It isn't obvious until the very last scene, an ambiguous ending really, where it seems the film loses a lot of what it's setting out to do in the first place.