An Oscar-winning true-story film is coming to Netflix this month. Erin Brockovich is a 2000 American biographical legal drama film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Susannah Grant. 

The film is a dramatisation of the true story of Erin Brockovich, portrayed by Julia Roberts, who initiated a legal case against Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) over its alleged culpability in the Hinkley groundwater contamination incident. From 1952 to 1966, PG&E dumped about 370 million US gallons of chromium-tainted wastewater into unlined wastewater spreading ponds around the town of Hinkley, California.

In 1993, legal clerk Erin Brockovich began an investigation into the health impacts of the contamination. A class-action lawsuit regarding the contamination was settled in 1996 for $333 million (£494 million today), the largest settlement of a class-action lawsuit in U.S. history at the time. In 2006, PG&E agreed to pay $295 million (£363 million today) to settle cases involving an additional 1,100 people statewide for claims related to hexavalent chromium.

Two years later, it settled the last of the Hinkley claims for $20 million (£22 million today). Since then, the town’s population has dwindled to the point that in 2016, The New York Times described Hinkley as having slowly become a ghost town.

The film received five nominations at the 73rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor (Albert Finney). Julia Roberts became the first actress to win an Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Critics’ Choice Movie Award, Golden Globe Award, National Board of Review Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award for a single performance.

Additionally, the film won the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Director, and the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role (Finney).

In 2021, members of the Writers’ Guild of America voted the film’s screenplay 78th in WGA’s 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (so far).

On Rotten Tomatoes, Erin Brockovich holds an approval rating of 85% based on 152 reviews, with an average rating of 7.50/10. The critics’ consensus reads: “Taking full advantage of Julia Roberts’s considerable talent and appeal, Erin Brockovich overcomes a few character and plot issues to deliver a smart, thoughtful, and funny legal drama.”

On Metacritic, the film has a weighted score of 73 out of 100 based on 36 critics, indicating “generally favourable reviews”. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “A” on an A+ to F scale.

In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote: “We get the best of independent cinema and the best of mainstream cinema all in one package. Erin Brockovich, like Wonder Boys right before it, makes the year 2000 seem increasingly promising for movies”

Newsweek’s David Ansen said: “Julia Roberts is flat-out terrific in Erin Brockovich. Roberts has wasted her effervescence on many paltry projects, but she hits the jackpot this time.

“Erin, single mother of three, a former Miss Wichita who improbably rallies a community to take on a multi-billion-dollar corporation, is the richest role of her career, simultaneously showing off her comic, dramatic and romantic chops”.

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers wrote: “Roberts shows the emotional toll on Erin as she tries to stay responsible to her children and to a job that has provided her with a first taste of self-esteem”.

Erin Brockovich is coming to Netflix this month, according to What’s On Netflix.