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Is Hiring a Criminal Defense Lawyer Worth the Cost? — Every Movie Has a Lesson

Violent crime rates actually took a dive in 2024. Homicides, in particular, saw a significant decrease of 16% compared to the previous year.

It is understandable to feel scared when you face criminal charges, no matter the crime. It is normal to feel mixed emotions – confusion, stress, and uncertainty about the future. One big worry that you may consider is whether involving a lawyer is worth the investment.

The truth is, a criminal charge can affect your future in a big way — your job, your freedom, and even your family. Fortress Law Group says any charge you face, big or small, causes stress to you, your friends and your family, but it’s important to know that you don’t have to go through this alone.

That’s why you deserve to work with someone you can trust to represent you well.

Understanding the Role of a Criminal Defense Lawyer

If you face charges in a criminal matter, comprehending the role of a criminal defense lawyer becomes crucial. Your lawyer represents you in the complex legal system.

They will scrutinize the evidence presented against you, identify weaknesses in the prosecution’s case, and craft a defense theory in your favor. They may also work out plea bargains, represent you at hearings, argue your case, and ensure that your rights remain protected.

Legal experts can present you with all the diverse possibilities available so that you can make an informed decision about what step to take, especially with the most serious or grave offenses, such as crimes of sexual assault, sexual abuse, and rape, says sexual offenses lawyer Lee A. Koch.

You aim for the best possible outcome, which could include a lighter sentence, dropped charges, or being acquitted; this is the goal that a defense lawyer will strive to achieve.

The Costs of Legal Representation

Knowing how much legal representation would cost is important; criminal cases are hard enough as they are. When you employ a criminal defense lawyer, the charges you pay him may include consultation fees, hourly fees, and possible retainer fees.

With the complexities of the case, these fees can sometimes get quite high. Some lawyers might work on a flat-rate basis for certain services, whereas others operate under hourly rates for services provided regarding a case.

Court charges, expert witness fees, and even investigation costs typically require your payment. So discuss the topic of payment upfront with your lawyer to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Weighing the costs against the potential risks of self-representation will assist you in making a decision about getting a lawyer.

Potential Consequences of Self-Representation

You may feel competent preparing your defense, but being your criminal lawyer might backfire. Complex laws and courtroom procedures may be difficult to understand without legal training. You may botch your case due to ignorance.

You may also miss deadlines or fail to acquire vital proof for your pleading, and the court may cling to that negative position. Self-represented defendants are often denigrated by jurors and judges, likely because they are unworthy candidates.

Emotionally charged situations can make objectivity difficult, which hurts the defense. Weighing the risks against the modest cost savings usually makes one reconsider self-defense.

Benefits of Hiring an Experienced Attorney

Criminal cases require an expert attorney for success. An attorney’s familiarity with the intricacies of the legal system proves beneficial when handling complex laws and processes.

They will evaluate the case, identify its strengths and flaws, and develop a defense strategy for you. If an attorney is experienced enough, negotiators and prosecutors create working connections with said attorneys that may benefit the client during negotiations.

They can also emotionally support you and help you understand your rights and legal issues. In the end, paying an expert will provide you peace of mind and increase your chances of success.

Making an Informed Decision: Cost vs. Outcome

The cost of hiring a criminal defense lawyer is another topic of consideration when discussing the potential costs. Allegations could be severe enough to disrupt your life for years, making them worthy of your immediate investment.

Consult the attorney’s experience, past wins, and ability to manage your situation’s specificity. An experienced lawyer might get you out of fines, jail time, and any criminal records.

Compare the price to the cost of representation, including the lawyer’s fees, and you may also consider the financial liabilities precipitated by a conviction. A criminal defense lawyer would protect you more than just your money—practically, your future.

Be sure to take the route that best suits your aims and situations.

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11/06/2025
Lollipop review – a gut-punching debut

The past couple of years have seen an influx of women filmmakers bringing timely, working-class stories to the big screen with lived reverence and fresh talent, from Rocks to Scrapper to Bird. The latest addition to this new social realist niche is Lollipop, a gut-punching debut from writer-director Daisy-May Hudson. The film follows Molly (Posy Sterling), a young mother released from jail but placed in a different prison when she tries to reunite with her children, who are being held in foster care. She finds herself in a hellish Catch-22: she can’t gain custody of her children without a roof over her head, but she can’t get a house via state assistance because her kids don’t live with her.

Hudson’s sharp film, inspired by her own experiences, passionately takes aim at the pitfalls and paradoxes of the social care system. After painfully short supervised visits with her children and missing out on key moments of their growth, Molly reaches a breaking point. Hudson isolates Molly when her conscientious smile cracks as, off-screen, the voices of social workers dictate that her children will remain in foster care until she has sorted herself out. Cinematographer Jaime Ackroyd frames Molly through the worker’s legs, like the bars of a cell. Sterling’s restrained performance transforms into something explosive; anger crumbles into devastation as the system repeatedly and harshly fails her. “You need to do more for me,” she begs, only to be met with: “There’s nothing more I can do.”

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Though some of the film’s most devastating moments occur inside the council office, it’s also where Molly reunites with her greatest supporter, college friend Amina (Idil Ahmed), who is living in a hostel for homeless families. Both women are soldiers fighting with a fierce love for their children. Their sisterhood interrupts the solemn tone as they find pockets of joy amid the devastation, gossiping in bed and dancing to UK garage music.

These moments highlight the distinct absence of men in Lollipop, bar Molly’s 5‑year-old son Leo (Luke Howitt). The companionship of other women is the foundation of Molly’s life, underscored by the challenging relationships with the all-women care workers or her overbearing but inattentive mother, Sylvie (TerriAnn Cousins).

The impressive nature of the performers is thanks to casting director Lucy Pardee, who recognised Sterling’s powerhouse leading potential but also discovered the brilliance of Tegan-Mia Stanley Rhoads. The latter, who plays Molly’s 11-year-old daughter Ava, takes centre stage when she tearfully pleads with her mother to obey the rules to avoid getting in more trouble. But Molly is desperate. The mother-daughter back-and-forths are sensitively penned and downright heart-wrenching to witness. It’s a stark reminder of the pain caused by a system that slashes welfare spending and demands a person to jump through hoops with their legs tied. Hudson’s film makes room to acknowledge that this is a family affair. Molly is at the epicentre, but the reverberations impact everyone around her.

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11/06/2025
How to Train Your Dragon — Every Movie Has a Lesson

MOVIE REVIEW: How to Train Your Dragon — Every Movie Has a Lesson

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10/06/2025
How To Train Your Dragon review – never quite…

Live-action remakes have come to dominate the kickoff of the summer movie season. Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, the creative duo behind early 2000s animated hits Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, have gone their separate ways, each now attempting to win the hearts of longtime fans and a new generation of moviegoers through live-action adaptations of their beloved animated classics. While Sanders has stepped back into the recording booth to reprise the voice of his mischievous alien creation, Stitch, DeBlois takes the reins as director of DreamWorks’ first ever live-action remake, steering the project in its entirety.

A live-action remake carries far more to answer for than an original film or even a sequel. In the case of How to Train Your Dragon, the adaptation largely follows its source material beat for beat, raising the question: what does the use of real actors and CGI bring to the table that animation does not and can that added tangibility truly offer an experience that surpasses the magic the original still holds to this day?

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Like everyone else in the Viking community on the Isle of Berk, Hiccup (Mason Thames) longs to prove himself by slaying the dragons that terrorize his village, setting rogue fires and making off with their livestock. But when he finally comes face-to-face with a Night Fury, one of the most feared and elusive breeds of dragon, the moment that should define his bravery once and for all reveals something deeper. Blade in hand, he falters, not out of fear, but out of empathy, and makes a choice that sets him on a path no one in his tribe could understand.

Unlike his peers, such as Astrid (Nico Parker) – one of the tribe’s most promising young members – Hiccup struggles to meet the expectations of his father, Stoick, the tribe’s formidable chief. Time and again, Stoick is frustrated and embarrassed by his son’s perceived lack of toughness. But what Stoick doesn’t realize is that Hiccup’s empathy and inventive mind may be exactly what their community needs to survive.

Slowly but surely, Hiccup begins to train and heal the Night Fury he names Toothless, inspired by the dragon’s retractable teeth and endearing, gummy expression. As fans of the original will remember, Toothless’s behavior was famously modeled after a cat, and this adaptation preserves that playful, curious energy, emphasizing the timeless dynamic of a boy and his pet. The bond that forms between Hiccup and Toothless remains the film’s undeniable heart, just as it was in the animated classic.

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10/06/2025
This Must Be the Place: A Queer East…

This is the first of three pieces published in collaboration with Queer East Film Festival, whose Emerging Critics project brought together six writers for a programme of mentorship throughout the festival.

Qinghan Chen

This year, Queer East presents a more defiant stance to the public. I felt it within the first three minutes of Takeshi Kitano’s Kubi, the festival’s opening film. When a headless corpse suddenly appeared on screen, I covered my eyes and nearly screamed out loud. In the next two hours, heads were severed with the flash of blades; homoerotic scenes were folded into the political intrigue. I closed my eyes more than once, retreating into the darkness, anchoring myself emotionally. When a disfigured head was kicked off-screen, the film ended. I fully understood what curator Yi Wang had joked about in his opening introduction: if you feel uncomfortable, please close your eyes.

In the cinema, I never know whether each passing moment will shock or stun me. Moving images pour down like a waterfall, an overused metaphor for queer desire, yet they are still potent enough to shatter my boundaries. But I can choose to close my eyes. With this act, my attention shifts away from the images on screen and turns inward, toward my own body. As a result, I become more aware of my existence. It feels like my eyes are building a temporary shelter, guarding my perception and granting me respite. When I am ready, I can open my eyes and jump back into that fleeting in-between space between myself and the screen. Perhaps I could discover new interactions between films and space.

I experienced a perfect accident after traveling an hour and a half to reach the ESEA Community Centre, where the short film programme Counter Archives was held. The screening room is a narrow space with a skylight, loosely covered by a piece of black fabric. Due to British summer time, the lingering daylight disrupted the images on the screen, making them blurry and erratic. Yet this imperfection created a unique feeling for me.

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10/06/2025
Materialists — Every Movie Has a Lesson

MOVIE REVIEW: Materialists — Every Movie Has a Lesson

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09/06/2025
The History of Sound – first-look review

When Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal) and David White (Josh O’Connor) meet over the top of a piano in a Boston college bar, the spark between them is instant. One is a talented vocal student, the other a composition major preoccupied with recording and cataloguing the folk music of rural communities – their shared passion for song is what brings them into each other’s orbit, and the onset of the First World War is what cruelly divides them for the first time. While David goes off to fight, Lionel returns to his family’s farm in Kentucky, where the work is hard and honest. By the time they meet again, they’re both a little worse for wear. A sojourn to rural Maine to continue David’s folk recording project provides both with a new sense of purpose, and rekindles their tentative romance, but like all great ballads, there’s tragedy on the horizon.

Oliver Hermanus’ sixth feature takes him to North America for the first time, casting two bona fide heartthrobs: Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor. When The History of Sound was announced in 2021 it set the internet ablaze, with many excited about the prospect of a tender gay romance starring two of the hottest young actors in the industry – but the resulting film is perhaps more restrained and delicate, sparing in its sexual content, for better or worse. In fact, there’s something even a little distant about the film, in which Lionel and David’s romance amounts to a few months across several years, and much of the focus is on its aftermath. The film is more concerned with how this pivotal moment in Lionel’s life changed everything about the person he would become.

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Josh O’Connor, seemingly incapable of delivering a bad performance, is wonderful and tragic as David, charismatic and glib and fantastically handsome. Who wouldn’t fall in love with him, or the way his tired smile never seems to reach his eyes? It’s a pity there isn’t more of him, and Mescal opposite is perhaps a little lost as Lionel, despite his best efforts to deliver a serviceable American accent and the charming chemistry between them. There’s just something a little too interior about his performance – it’s difficult to buy that his relationship with David really is as significant as the film wants us to believe it is. It’s also a little unfortunate for Mescal that he’s outperformed by Chris Cooper as an older version of Lionel; he delivers a searing emotional monologue in the film’s final act which provides some much-needed resonance. But to Mescal’s credit, his singing sequences are quite beautiful, as are O’Connor’s, and the folk soundtrack evokes Inside Llewyn Davis in its soulfulness.

The film feels weighed down by some unnecessary sequences that don’t help to drive the story forward, occasionally forgetting that the crux of the film should be Lionel and David’s relationship and its long shadow; a sharper cut might prevent the film from sagging once the lovers part ways. While comparisons with Brokeback Mountain are inevitable among those with a limited understanding of queer cinema, The History of Sound has far more in common with Merchant Ivory – particularly The Remains of the Day and Maurice – in its pervasive melancholy and sense of profound regret at past inertia. It’s not repression that powers The History of Sound, but the tragedy of understanding something far too late to chase it. Its buttoned-up nature and chasteness might frustrate those hoping for a more salacious story, but Hermanus and writer Ben Shatuck (adapting from his own short story of the same name) have produced a unique and moving romance for those willing to listen.

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09/06/2025
Romería – first-look review | Little White Lies

In her Golden Bear-winning Alcarrás, Carla Simón meets a family standing on the brink of a monumental life change, chronicling the minutia of their lives as it begins to morph into something foreign. In Romería, this change lies in the past, where it remained flimsily buried until the curious hands of young Marina (Llúcia Garcia) came to pluck it back to the surface.

The girl, raised by her mother’s family after becoming orphaned at a young age, just turned 18, and needs to rectify her birth certificate to include her biological father so she can qualify for a scholarship. This bureaucratic chore sees her travel alone from bustling Barcelona towards Vigo, a small city nested in the northwestern coast, where she is suddenly not only no longer alone but surrounded by dozens of family members she either has not met or has very little recollection of.

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Romería stands for pilgrimage in Spanish, and the film is as much of a literal pilgrimage in Marina’s long overdue homecoming as it is for Simon herself. The semiautobiographical drama is set in 2004, and sees Marina try to make sense of this new expansive world suddenly engulfing her through the low-quality lens of a digital camera. The director zooms into crooked wooden alabasters and delicately swinging wind chimes, grasping at texture and sound with the voracity of those who understand the stakes of faded memories.

Like in her two previous features, Simon is most interested in capturing the intricate fabric of familial relationships molded by the intimacy of time and suddenly reworked by life’s tricky, unpredictable hands. Similarly to six-year-old Frida in Summer of 1993, Marina has to make sense of the invisible strings connecting the new people that come flooding into her life as well as thread the foreign environment that has shaped them into being. Unlike Frida, however, Marina is on the cusp of womanhood and therefore privy to thornier, more elusive human complexities, and this is where Romería finds its anchoring emotional core.

That is because both of Marina’s parents have died young, and not of complications of hepatitis like her father’s death certificate claims. The two, who suffered from heroine addiction, contracted AIDS at the height of the epidemic. Much of Romería is told through passages of Marina’s mother’s diaries from 1983, the pages at times made map, at others maze. As the words echo in the teen’s head, lingering in the air of the film through a poignant voice over, a reality long-buried begins to become clearer and clearer.

The Spanish director broaches the still-present taboo of the virus in a crescendo. When some of Marina’s many cousins sneakily roll some joints in the labyrinthine underworld of the family boat, they make sure to ease away each other’s trepidations by remarking that a little bit of weed won’t turn them into their parents. Then the uncles and aunties ruminate over lost friends and family, ressusciating the dead through the power of collective recollection. The young fell like flies back in the 80s, they say, it was either “accidents, overdose, or AIDS.”

But, despite a taste of confrontation when the film leaves the realm of the harbor and finally enters the family home and a brief, somewhat tonally misguided flashback, Romería is loyal to its sense of withholding almost until the very end. It is then, finally, that Simon reaches the grand apex of her journey of self-reflection, one that holds in the stunning clarity of carefully chosen words a moving encompassing of how one can only build a sturdy foundation for the future after lovingly repairing the unrectified cracks of the past.

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09/06/2025
Monica Sorelle: ‘I’m working through my grief…

The politics of the film are impossible to ignore though, especially as those in power in the United States perpetuate falsities about Haitian immigrants and strip them of rights. Monica is, rightfully, baffled that she has to have this kind of conversation: “It feels so stupid to have to do this, but I also thought a lot about demystifying Haitian culture for a lot of people. Even though we have such large populations in major metropolitan cities, I feel like we’re underrepresented and a lot of what you hear about us is geopolitical tragedies and news from the island. In a way, I just wanted to talk about the culture I grew up in and the family members I know, just honoring them in a way that I don’t think they’ve been honored in cinema before.”

Films like Fernando Frías de la Parra’s Ya no estoy aquí and Ira Sachs’ Little Men were influential to the approach Sorelle took with Mountains – the former in how to find “relatability in specificity” in its depiction of Monterrey and the latter in its “quiet beauty in approaching gentrification, power, and economic status” – but Italian neorealism also directly influenced its creation. “We’re watching, in real time, an entire city and neighborhood being changed before our eyes, so having a mostly realist approach was the best way to show how capitalism really sucks the magic out of everything.”

“Haitians and other Caribbean folks are so magical. There’s a mysticality to our experiences and our spirituality, but I wanted to ground the film in realism to imagine that the only thing that existed for our lead, Xavier, was the pursuit of material success. We only lean into magical realism near the end to usher him out of that mindset,” she explains. That realism even ties into the way that language is approached in the film, with characters and actors actually speaking Creole like the Haitian immigrants in our fair city actually do. It’s something that Sorelle is conscious she could not have managed with a bigger movie, but the limitations of the microbudget feature did not stop her from making the film she wanted to make.

“I was motivated by the personal ethos of the film and the small crew,” Monica says, noting that the community she built with this film is a grand part of what made the experience worthwhile. “Production was really mobile in case of anything, like if a neighbor passed by that we could interview. We kept our footprint small in the community, but there were things that happened that made shooting hard. We’d be on a demolition site and thought they were on break and in the middle of the dialogue, the work started up again and we’re having to scream at each other through the scene.”

“We had to roll with those punches, but everyone showed up. Everyone who’s there, on screen or off, put their all into it because they believed in the story, and that’s indicative of the kind of community filmmaking that I hope to continue being a part of, even as I scale up. Maybe a smarter filmmaker would make something that can be shot in Belarus or something, but I’ve built a community in Miami and I’m in love with them and want to continue making films about us.”

For now, she’s continuing to prep and create new work and, as she jokes, Monica is “pretty gagged” about her place in BFI’s Black Debutantes series, which she is thankful to Rógan Graham for putting together and placing these works in front of audiences in the UK. “I’m showing with so many heroes and elders that I look up to, like the fact that my name is anywhere near Cauleen Smith is amazing. Even with the constraints that these women had on their budgets, on their films, on their creativity, they were somehow still able to make groundbreaking work. I’m so proud to be standing arm-in-arm with these brilliant women.”

Mountains plays at the BFI on May 29 2025 as part of the Black Debutants season.

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08/06/2025
Thirsty — Every Movie Has a Lesson

MOVIE REVIEW: Thirsty — Every Movie Has a Lesson

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08/06/2025

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