The Burial (2023)

The Burial conducts itself like a legal procedural that has read the room and dressed accordingly. Jamie Foxx plays Willie E. Gary, a Florida personal injury attorney with a wardrobe budget and a gift for the theatrical, hired by a Mississippi funeral home owner for the simple reason that the jury will be Black. The film says so out loud. Jury selection, the exploitation of Black church congregations, the detail about a witness's grandfather and the Klan: the machinery of racial grievance is the engine here, not the upholstery. Corporate predation follows close behind, with the Loewen Group's appetite for small funeral homes and overpriced insurance packages treated as the villain's true crime. The critique stops at the boardroom door, content to indict a bad company instead of the arrangement that produced it.

On matters of representation, the cast is largely Black and the film treats this as a fact of the story instead of a press release. Jurnee Smollett takes the opposing counsel role and handles it with a cold competence, though the screenplay keeps its affection for the two men in the room. The courtroom speeches are long, righteous, and aimed squarely at the back row; the film wants us to feel the injustice and to applaud when it is answered. It is sermonizing of the most agreeable kind, which is to say it goes down easily and asks very little of anyone.

Everything else is absent. There is no climate anxiety, no body-diverse subplot, no neurodivergent arc, no queer reading available even to the most determined undergraduate. The result is a well-made, well-acted crowd-pleaser that knows its audience and serves them a verdict they already wanted. The judge, the jury, and the streaming algorithm all rule in its favor.