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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 6
   Philadelphia

   Tom Hanks plays an HIV-positive lawyer suing his firm for wrongful dismissal in this landmark 1993 film about AIDS discrimination.
7. 7
   Primal Fear

   Richard Gere plays a hotshot defense attorney whose seemingly open-and-shut case becomes dangerously complex in this 1996 thriller.
8. 8
   Judgment at Nuremberg

   Stanley Kramer's 1961 epic dramatizes the Nuremberg trials of German judges who served under Hitler's regime.
9. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.