It remains a good movie, with an important message about the costs of intolerance and radicalization. It doesn’t, however, quite live up to the shattering power of its early moments.

In the Fade is never less than gripping.

It's a mercurial performance, subtly modulated, and somewhat at odds with an increasingly melodramatic potboiler that flirts uneasily with the pulpy conventions of vengeance-fuelled B-movies.

In the Fade would be more tonally coherent if it stuck to the courtroom plotline, even if that would make it little more than a glorified episode of some legal procedural TV show.