Film

On the Basis of Sex

A handsome, old-fashioned biopic shaped like a courtroom underdog story: earnest, well-tailored, and anchored by Felicity Jones's steely young Ruth Bader Ginsburg fighting to make sex discrimination legally visible. It's inspirational rather than probing, more polished Sunday-afternoon prestige than cinematic revelation — a comfort watch for anyone who wants institutional sexism to lose, cleanly, on schedule.

TMDb rating7.3

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RBG2018

The real footage, the real voice, the real cases - this documentary gives you everything the biopic compresses, plus decades more of her life and the cultural weight she carried into old age.

But It's hagiographic almost by design; if you want a warts-and-all portrait rather than a celebration, look elsewhere.

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Marshall2017

Chadwick Boseman plays a young Thurgood Marshall arguing an unwinnable-looking case, and the film shares the same faith that one sharp lawyer in the right courtroom can bend the law's arc.

But It leans hard into crowd-pleasing courtroom beats and simplifies some of the messier history around the case it dramatizes.

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Loving2016

A quieter, sadder cousin - a real interracial couple's marriage becomes a Supreme Court case, told with almost no courtroom grandstanding, just two frightened, stubborn people.

But If you came for speechifying and legal fireworks, this film withholds them deliberately; it's hushed where the other film is triumphant.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Adam's Rib1949

Same premise decades earlier: a married legal team using one case to argue the law's treatment of women must change - except here it's screwball comedy, not a solemn biopic.

Hepburn and Tracy play married lawyers on opposite sides of a case about a woman who shot her cheating husband, turning the whole film into a screwball argument about whether the law treats men and women the same. It's sharp, fast, and startlingly modern.

But It's a black-and-white 1940s comedy of manners, not a courtroom drama in the modern sense, and its gender politics resolve a little too neatly by today's standards.

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More like this (8)

Hidden Figures2016

Same appetite for watching brilliant women out-argue a system built to underestimate them, transplanted to NASA in the 1960s, with warmer, more communal energy than RBG's solitary grind.

But It smooths some genuinely ugly history into an easily digestible, crowd-pleasing package.

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Philadelphia1993

An earlier, angrier discrimination courtroom drama - Tom Hanks as a lawyer fired for having AIDS - showing how the genre looks when the stakes are literally life and death.

But It's a much heavier, sadder film, and some of its handling of its subject now feels dated.

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The Post2017

Another handsome period piece about a woman - Katharine Graham - finding her authority inside institutions built to ignore her, filmed with the same prestige sheen.

But The legal stakes are about a newspaper's right to publish, not sex discrimination, so the parallel is more in mood than substance.

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North Country2005

A grittier, angrier version of the same fight - Charlize Theron as a miner suing her employer for sexual harassment - with less polish and more fury.

But It's a bleaker, more brutal watch, and some of its dramatic embellishments have been criticized as heavy-handed.

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Erin Brockovich2000

Julia Roberts as an unlikely legal crusader who wins through sheer stubbornness rather than credentials - a scrappier, funnier take on outsider-beats-the-system.

But It's a civil suit about contamination, not a constitutional sex-discrimination case, so the legal substance is quite different.

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Suffragette2015no page yet

Goes back a century further to the fight for the vote itself, with a bleaker, more violent register reminding you how recent and hard-won any of this progress actually was.

But It's a much grimmer film with little polished courtroom satisfaction; the ending offers far less closure.

Nine to Five1980

Same target, workplace sexism baked into the rules of the game, dressed in a completely different costume: raucous comic fantasy instead of courtroom procedure.

Three secretaries turn the tables on their sexist, credit-stealing boss in a film that's broad and silly, but absolutely furious underneath about the same institutional contempt RBG spent her career litigating against.

But It's farce, not drama - fantasy revenge rather than legal argument - so if you want the case-by-case seriousness, this will feel frivolous.

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He Named Me Malala2015no page yet

Swap the American courtroom for a global campaign and decades for a few short years: both insist the law and culture around girls and women has to catch up.

A documentary about Malala Yousafzai's fight for girls' education gives you the contemporary, global version of the same story: one determined young person using public argument to force institutions to change.

But It's aimed at a broader, younger audience and trades courtroom procedure for activism and advocacy, making it a much softer, more inspirational register.

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