Conviction

Yes, the title has two meanings, but that just makes it doubly obvious. There’s not much poetry here, only belaboring: This conviction refers both to the guilty verdict that put a man (Sam Rockwell) in prison for many years, and to the certitude with which his sister (Hilary Swank) then devoted her life to proving his innocence. Swank cranks up her Academy-approved emotionalism and Rockwell shows his usual good sense of proportion, but their roles are too blandly characterized. The same goes for various good but undernourished supporting turns, like Melissa Leo’s cop with an ax to grind. The main problem with screenwriter Pamela Gray and director Tony Goldwyn’s functional if forgettable drama is that a well-organized fidelity to remarkable facts is not the same thing as a dramatic shape. The movie wrongly worries that courtroom scenes and other legal procedures are inherently boring, whereas cloying childhood flashbacks are not.