"My cousin Vinny" - Trial and error, literally.

"My Cousin Vinny" is one of those movies that I've heard good things about throughout my life but never really taken the time to give it a chance.

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And, in a way, I'm grateful that it's the first movie I've seen in this newly arrived 2025, a year in which I plan to lighten up a bit my dense list of pending films on Letterboxd.

Although whenever Joe Pesci is mentioned to me, my mind inevitably immediately goes to the great gangster movies he starred in under the direction of Martin Scorsese (Casino, Goodfellas and the relatively recent Irishman), the truth is that on several occasions the New Jersey actor demonstrated his ability to adapt to basically any genre, and what better example at this time than the iconic Home Alone and its sequel.

However, aside from the dense dramas I just mentioned, I don't feel there's a better work to showcase his talent than My Cousin Vinny, a 1992 comedy directed by Jonathan Lyn that stars alongside Ralph Macchio and the talented Marisa Tomei (who, by the way, ended up winning an Oscar for her performance).

In a nutshell, My Cousin Vinny is the story of an inexperienced lawyer who looks for a way to get his cousin and his best friend out of jail, after they are wrongly accused of a murder they didn't commit.

My Cousin Vinny is a perfect example of one of those comedies that seem to be less and less common, characterized by excellent direction, great performances, and a script that knows how to keep us hooked even though the premise they are executing is extremely simple. In less than 10 minutes the plot is established and all that's left to do is enjoy.

In its two hours of duration (which by the way end up feeling quite short) we become accomplices of all Vinny's actions to try to free his cousin, working together with his fiancée and thus facing the judicial system of rural Alabama.

And despite being a "comedy", it is gratifying that its way of representing a legal/criminal procedure is so successful, something that we could think ends up making viewing a boring task, but quite the opposite: it is one of the main engines for the funniest moments of the entire film.

My Cousin Vinny is an undeniable classic, and represents a type of film that I would like to see more regularly today, simple but with an undeniable artistic value.

Score taken from my Letterboxd account.