Anthony Hopkins shoots his wife in the head when she cheats on him with a cop, then enjoys the process of defending himself against a slick young lawyer, perhaps a little too much.

This might be the best court room movie I’ve ever seen – if not, it’s got to be the best of the last 5 years. A big part of that was how warm the screen presence of Ryan Gosling, who plays the career ladder climbing lawyer on his last case before leaving the District Attorney’s office for a lucrative junior role in a private practice, was. And with his slick courtroom performance counterpointed so well by the seemingly bumbling killer.

I had a lot of trouble understanding the character’s motivations at various times – this is because they didn’t make sense, not because I was distracted by the memory of a fantastic dinner of sizzling hot Korean food. But if you can move past these problems, and the (I thought) incredibly obvious “twist” (no the first the one, the second one shouldn’t even be called that) I think you’ll find it’s a lot of fun to watch the trevails of these flawed characters.

I found the love interest (Rosamund Pike, as the law talking guy’s supervisor in the new firm) to be kind of creepy, she has weird eyes, almost dead looking. She’s still hot, but it’s off putting.

It’s fun to feel your opinion of the characters changing through the movie, for a long time I (and a large part of the audience, if the laughs were anything to go by) was really sympathetic towards the killer – it’s not nice to have your love fuck around behind your back – but at the very end, there is no sympathy, he’s turned into nothing but a cold hearted, darkly evil man.

If it’s still out (I viewed it a couple of weeks ago) you should go see it.