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?

1

12 Angry Men

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

2

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.

3

The Verdict

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

4

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.

5

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.

6

Philadelphia

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

7

Primal Fear

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

8

Judgment at Nuremberg

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

9

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.

10

Kramer vs. Kramer

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

11

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.

12

Dark Waters

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

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.