A groundbreaking and timeless masterpiece of cinema

Rating: 7/10 (26 April 2014)

Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men is one of the very few historic features to uphold its high reputation when watching it today and really is a groundbreaking and timeless masterpiece of cinema, showing just how much can be achieved from a mundane premise. The story of the eponymous dozen of more or less agitated men, jurymen to be precise, gaining more and more insight into a seemingly certain murder verdict is one of, if not the best character study ever put on film and pulls off the sheerly unfeasible feat of gripping its audience over a time of an hour and a half with the setting never changing once.
The means by which this is achieved are a trailblazing storytelling style and twelve superb actors, each of them getting multiple chances to prove their talent by a brilliantly conceived script. The cast, including names such as Henry Fonda, Jack Klugman, or Lee J. Cobb, has an absorbing quality to their acting, easily making one forget that the film is nothing but a couple of lads bantering for the entire running time. It's almost funny, how such a simple story can lead to such exquisite writing, as Reginald Rose equips the twelve angry men with a realistic past, relatable character traits, and pieces of dialogue fitting perfectly to those criteria.
Due to the lack of things to be gained when rewatching the film, it's not one of my all-time favourites, but 12 Angry Men is indubitably a classic and highly inspiring picture – regardless of your wanting to pursue a career as a director, actor, or screenwriter.