Phil Spector works best when it’s just Al Pacino and Helen Mirren sat in a room spitting out Mamet’s dialogue. There are extended stretches here that are up there with some of Mamet’s best stuff and having actors as adept as Mirren and Pacino (putting in some of his best work in years might I add) doesn’t hurt either. At times the film feels a little hampered by an obligation to actually document some of the minutiae of Spector’s trial and you can definitely feel Mamet’s interest wane when there are more than two people talking but otherwise this is a pleasingly low-key character study about one of the weirdest pop-culture crossovers – pop music and true crime – in recent memory.