MARK JUDGE: A Radical Left Without the Radicalism. “The Trial of the Chicago 7, Sorkin’s preachy and all-over-the-place new film (screening in certain theaters and arriving on Netflix today), largely fails because it avoids a direct accounting for the motivation of its characters. For to do so would be to uncover some very uncomfortable truths about the American left, radicalism, and the 1960s—truths that Sorkin, who both wrote and directed the film, would rather not face. The most obvious is that many of the activists from that tumultuous and overly exposed era were Marxists and radicals out to destroy the United States.”

It’s not so much that he doesn’t want to face that, as that he doesn’t want Americans to know that.