Good film. I have seen this movie twice and it was better the second time around. Great performances by every actor and good storyline. Should have won honours.

Personally my favorite movie of all time, i don't get rotten tomato! The movie was great in every aspect of it, couldn't ask for more actually, two legendary actors in one drama which is my favorite category, maybe i liked the movie because i could see myself in one or two of the characters, but i still loved the performance, writing, screenplay.. really couldn't ask for more. I still get shocked when people tell me that they never even heard of it! The judge is really underrated movie, either you experienced something in movie or not, you'll still get chills.. maybe a few tears. The ending really had me, i had to rewatch the movie to realize the references. Really couldn't ask for more, except asking the cast to do something like it.

Really looked forward to this film, although newspaper reviews were lukewarm, since I have always liked courtroom type stories. (My father was a lawyer). And with actors like Robert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr., how bad could it be? Answer: Not bad, really, but still disappointing. First, it was soooo long, nearly two-and-a-half hours, while the story wasn't all that complicated. Second, the script was what I call overwritten, meaning that much of what was said was very complex and sounded contrived, yet spoken very quickly, so it made me feel that the actors were just reciting their lines, not speaking from the heart. I think Duvall was better than Downey overall, as I find his glib style, similar to his awkward moments in "Chef", to be annoying after awhile, even obnoxious. Plus it was fairly predictable, even though it took almost forever to get there.

In this film, a son who graduated as a lawyer returns to his homeland, a small town in the country to see his father, who is a local court judge and with whom he has never had a good relationship. However, he ends up offering to defend him when the elderly judge is charged with murder. The best of the film is the story, a family drama that holds our attention from the beginning because the characters were so well developed psychologically that they end up touching us. Robert Downey Jr. and veteran Robert Duvall give life to son and father, respectively, and both are huge in their performances, being very good how they interact with each other in front of the camera. But neither are sympathetic characters. They are very similar, cranky and a little stern, and because they are very similar, they have difficulty living together. The rest of the cast plays secondary roles but gives good support to these two actors.