One of the best, if not THE best, courtroom drama in the history of cinema.

Rating: 10/10 (7 June 2006)

Sidney Lumet's "12 Angry Men" is a film that would never appeal to me because of its old age and its black and white film, but once I started watching this, I couldn't help but get sucked in with everything unraveling in the jury room. There are no small characterization among the 12 jurors, with each one having a lot of resonance and importance to the story, something I found very well done thanks to Reginald Rose's script. Even though I think each of the 12 jurors are very well-characterized, the two that stood out in my mind are Juror #8 (played by Henry Fonda) and Juror #3 (played by Lee J. Cobb). Juror #8 is the main protagonist out of the 12, simply because he's the one who stood for the 18 year old Hispanic kid, who's convicted of murdering his father, from the very beginning. His determination and graceness carries throughout the film, and Henry Fonda played wonderfully in this role. Lee J. Cobb's Juror #3, the main antagonist of the film, is the definition of arrogance and ignorance. This is the film that should make Lee J. Cobb as one of the biggest defining actors in Hollywood history, and his performance as Juror #3 is very, very memorable. One of the big reasons why I didn't really enjoy watching "black and white" movies are that they feel too slow and have too much reliance on talking, but this one is an exception. Even though the movie is all talk, I found that the script is very, very well written and kept the tension going among the 12 jurors and its final outcome. Each character is distinctly different, with some similarities but also some differentiation, which makes each of the characters believable and relatable in one way or the other. The story, although strictly a courtroom drama, really gives a rather worldly aura within the interaction between the different jurors, since each juror has their own story to tell in relations to the conviction of the 18 year old Hispanic boy. Even though this is the only film I saw from Sidney Lumet, I can tell that if this is one of the movies considered classic, then I've missed out on others as well. He has done a very good job with keeping the story flowing and doesn't direct any jarring moments within the only place the jurors are in throughout the whole movie (the jury room). He kept the jury process interesting and engaging, something other courtroom drama didn't really do right. All in all, this should be the film that set the standard of courtroom drama. I don't think any film surpass "12 Angry Men" in that regard, so I think this should be on any serious film collector's collection. Sidney Lumet's masterpiece garners a 10/10 and is in my opinion the best courtroom drama ever filmed (unless I've missed out on others).