What is the best courtroom drama film?

From timeless jury-room classics to gripping legal thrillers spanning civil rights, corporate crime, and military injustice, these films make the law feel like pure cinema. Who gets your verdict?

12 Angry Men

Sidney Lumet's 1957 masterpiece follows twelve jurors as one holdout slowly convinces the others to reconsider a murder verdict.

1/13

To Kill a Mockingbird

Gregory Peck won an Oscar playing Atticus Finch, a lawyer who defends a Black man falsely accused of rape in the Deep South.

2/13

The Verdict

Paul Newman plays a down-and-out alcoholic lawyer who takes on a medical malpractice case against the Catholic Church in 1982.

3/13

Witness for the Prosecution

Billy Wilder's 1957 adaptation of Agatha Christie's play features Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton in a twisting murder trial.

4/13

A Few Good Men

Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson face off in this 1992 military courtroom drama centered on the deaths of two Marines at Guantanamo.

5/13

Philadelphia

Tom Hanks plays an HIV-positive lawyer suing his firm for wrongful dismissal in this landmark 1993 film about AIDS discrimination.

6/13

Primal Fear

Richard Gere plays a hotshot defense attorney whose seemingly open-and-shut case becomes dangerously complex in this 1996 thriller.

7/13

Judgment at Nuremberg

Stanley Kramer's 1961 epic dramatizes the Nuremberg trials of German judges who served under Hitler's regime.

8/13

My Cousin Vinny

Joe Pesci plays an inexperienced lawyer defending his cousin in a murder trial in small-town Alabama in this beloved 1992 comedy.

9/13

Kramer vs. Kramer

A landmark 1979 divorce drama starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep that became one of the defining films of its era.

10/13

The Lincoln Lawyer

Matthew McConaughey plays a defense attorney who operates out of the back of his Lincoln Town Car in this 2011 legal thriller.

11/13

Dark Waters

Mark Ruffalo plays a corporate defense attorney who uncovers a massive cover-up by a chemical company in this 2019 legal thriller.

12/13

Marshall

The story of a young Thurgood Marshall defending a Black chauffeur accused of rape in Connecticut in 1941, long before his Supreme Court career.

13/13