Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Pierre Goldman was impossible. He was also very real: a gun-wielding French leftist intellectual who became a cause célèbre. Now he scowls from The Goldman Case, a high-voltage account of his 1976 retrial for a double murder of which he had already been convicted. But the film opens with that adamantine hardness to please. We haven’t even set eyes on Goldman yet and already he is causing havoc, seeking to fire his lawyer for endless professional failings. (That lawyer, Georges Kiejman, would later seek a quieter life as the French minister of justice.)Everything else plays out in a crisply modernist courtroom. Two of the most inspired French movies of recent years have been pointedly precise legal dramas. Alice Diop’s Saint Omer used verbatim court transcripts in a story based on another real murder case. Justine Triet’s Oscar-winner Anatomy of a Fall was fiction, but built around a set-piece trial. Now The Goldman Case too brings justice into close-up: the fragility of witnesses, and what we would now call confirmation bias.But director Cédric Kahn also takes a subtly different tack. Where Diop and Triet contrasted sober, even sterile courtrooms with the emotional churn and big-picture context of their cases, here the truth is claimed to be a narrow, dispassionate thing. And the trial? Bedlam.It makes for pulsing cinema. Lawyers loom and jab, police and witnesses parry, all while a chorus of longhairs loudly support their man. And then there is Goldman himself (well played by Arieh Worthalter): seething, mercurial, a magnetic champion of his own innocence and, he says, objective truth.As well as mounting a fevered courtroom drama, Kahn and Worthalter do something important: capturing the rock-star charisma of their subject with his novelistic past in Jewish Paris while also keeping a measure of distance. Goldman is not a murderer, he insists. But a gangster? Oui. And for all that facts are elusive, the movie says, we are duty-bound to pursue them.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from September 20
