Hotel Mumbai is a shockingly violent action thriller—Die Hard on steroids—except the events it depicts are real.

It tells the story of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, focusing on the brutal assault of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Because Mumbai didn’t have any kind of militarized police force to combat these terrorists, who were armed with assault rifles and grenades, the city had to wait several hours before reinforcement from New Delhi could arrive. They were essentially sitting ducks.

The film keeps you in its sickening thrall for all of its 125 minutes, and is mounted, by Australian director Anthony Maras, with undeniable skill. But I’m still trying to sort out if it should have been made at all.

Let’s go on this journey through my thought process together, shall we?

For starters, I’ll just say it right out: I’m uncomfortable with a film that highlights extremist Muslim terrorism at a time when Islamophobia is raging. Do we really need such a film right now? To what end? The men who commit these atrocious acts represent a statistically irrelevant band of zealots and in no way reflect the 1.5 billion peaceful Muslims around the world. So why add to the dangerous propaganda?

To (slightly) combat that, Maras depicts the Pakistani young men who execute these brutal acts of terror in a somewhat compassionate way—for starters, most are still in (or barely out of) their teens. They’ve been indoctrinated by a mastermind, who convinces them that the people they’re killing are soulless infidels. A few are even given humanizing moments—one terrorist tearfully calls his father to tell him he loves him, another playfully convinces his friend he’s just eaten pork as a gag, and at least one of the boys shows actual mercy. But those moments are few and far between. For the most part, the terrorists are rampaging through the hotel, indiscriminately but efficiently killing people and, in some cases, making others do their bidding for them. Quite frankly, we want to see them dead.

The good news: the heroes in this film are mostly brown people, too—the Indian staff and management of this world-class hotel. What makes Hotel Mumbai watchable, and even poignant, is the commitment to service that these hotel workers demonstrated, even when it could potentially—indeed probably—lead to their own deaths.

I should set the stage a bit. The opulent Taj Mahal Palace Hotel lives up to its name—soaring ceilings, marble staircases, chandeliers, and guests that include numerous high rollers and VIPs. The management knows—and caters to—all of its guests’ needs: a warm bath with rose petals when they arrive, a favorite vintage of wine in the cellar, etc. They pride themselves on complete customer satisfaction. The main players in the film are both guests and workers at the hotel.

We have our hero, Arjun (Dev Patel), a poor young Sikh with a toddler and pregnant wife at home, who works as a waiter in the hotel’s main restaurant. In his rush to get to the hotel in the morning, he has lost his shoes. He’s nearly sent home by the restaurant’s exacting head chef Hemant Oberoi (Anupam Kher)—another hero—but when he pleads to stay, Oberoi loans him a pair of his own shoes, which are far too small. Arjun gratefully crams his feet into them anyway. Once the shooting starts, he demonstrates leadership qualities and bravery that are a credit to his faith.

Outside the hotel are two local cops who realize that reinforcement isn’t coming and they’ll have to try to save as many guests as possible by themselves—two men with pistols against multiple terrorists with machine guns. “If we don’t go in there, everyone will die,” one of the cops says, with sad determination.

Among the guests are a famous American architect (Armie Hammer), his beautiful Muslim wife (Nazanin Boniadi), their infant son, and their nanny. There’s also a crude Russian millionaire with large appetites (Jason Isaacs), who proves to be more gallant than he initially seems.

One of the best scenes of Hotel Mumbai showcases the film’s saving grace—its humanity. As many of the VIP guests are crammed into a private club, hiding from the terrorists, one white woman demands that Arjun remove his turban—it’s making her nervous. The way Arjun handles this moment, and the mutual understanding it leads to, is truly extraordinary.

So yes, Hotel Mumbai has moments of grace. But it’s still brutal, unforgiving—and the viciousness of the violence can’t help but to feel exploitative. Is it worth watching? I guess that’s up to the individual. I’d say ultimately that those glimmers of extraordinary bravery and kindness on display made me glad I watched it. But I can’t make that call for you.

If you watched the excellent Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary, RBG, you already know that the Supreme Court justice’s late husband, Marty Ginsburg, was the true love of her life and a man of uncommon kindness and decency. You also know that he was an acclaimed tax lawyer who somewhat put his own career on the back burner to support his wife’s rapidly rising star. He’s a big part of that film’s heart, but ultimately a minor figure, as the doc focuses primarily—and rightly—on its subject. With On the Basis of Sex, the fictionalized account of Ginsburg’s early life and career, director Mimi Leder and writer Daniel Stiepleman chose to go a different route: They put the relationship between Ruth (Felicity Jones) and Marty (Armie Hammer) front and center. The film is arguably as much about the love story between Ruth and Marty as it is about Ruth’s groundbreaking gender discrimination arguments before the Court of Appeals.

Think I’m exaggerating?

Here’s the final exchange of the film:

Marty: You did it!

Ruth: We did it.
Me: Groan.

Needless to say, I’m not exactly thrilled with this approach to the material, even if I get it. Marty was a pivotal part of Ruth’s early career and deeply supportive of his wife. And it was, indeed, Marty who brought to Ruth’s attention the particular tax case—a bachelor who was denied the caregiver’s exemption normally afforded to women after he hired a nurse to tend to his ailing mother—that she would ultimately argue in front of the Court of Appeals. (Cleverly, Ginsburg chose a case where the man was the one being discriminated against on the basis of sex.) But still. I’ve seen so many biopics about a towering male figure and his supportive wife (usually played by a highly overqualified actress) where she is relegated to a glorified cheerleading role. Not the case here.

So how’s the rest of the film? Pretty solid as such things go. Jones is good, if a tad bland, as Ginsburg. She chooses to play young Ginsburg as tight-lipped, super studious, and preternaturally determined. She’s not supposed to be charming, that’s the point—“You come across as a bitter, unlikable shrew,” says the ACLU’s Mel Wulf (Justin Theroux) (and he was ostensibly her friend!). Still, the real Bader Ginsburg has an undeniable magnetism that Jones doesn’t quite convey. Hammer, playing the perfect man, basically, is well cast. (At this point, he is cinema’s premier Dreamy Jew ™). And I enjoyed the hell out of Theroux, chewing the scenery, Stanley Tucci-style, as the brash, cocky ACLU director who is progressive but still needs to be convinced that a woman can do a man’s job. There’s also a small, but pivotal role for Kathy Bates, as Ruth’s hero, the pioneering gender equality lawyer Dorothy Kenyon, and she’s as salty, earthy, and welcome a presence as ever.

The script is mostly of the Wikipedia sort, with a few on-the-nose clunkers, especially involving scenes between Ruth and her feminist teenage daughter, Jane (Cailee Spaeny). In one such scene, Jane talks back to a couple of cat-callers on the street and Ruth marvels at her: “Look at you, Jane! You’re a liberated young woman!” A few scenes later, Jane gives her mother a pep talk, after Ruth apologizes for being so preoccupied with her case. “Who is [the case] for, if not for me?” Jane says, prophetically.

The best thing about this dramatization of Ginsburg’s life is how many cathartic moments it provides, as Ruth faces astonishing institutional sexism and again and again proves her doubters wrong. That’s why you watch On the Basis of Sex. To see all the obstacles she overcame, all of the men she outwitted and humiliated on her way to the top. Honestly, for that alone, it’s worth the price of admission.