The Movies canon

Sourced and screened.

Every film chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
8 films
SortEditorial Year Title
Genre·Legal drama✕clear
Legal drama · Drama

Judgment at Nuremberg

Directed by Stanley Kramer
1961

Stanley Kramer put real concentration camp footage into a Hollywood film in 1961 and made audiences sit with it: the trial is of judges, which makes the question about everybody.

★ 4.2
Legal drama · Drama

Philadelphia

Directed by Jonathan Demme
1993

The first major studio film to take AIDS seriously, aimed squarely at people who had not: a lawyer sues the firm that fired him, and Bruce Springsteen wrote the opening song.

★ 4.7
Legal drama · Drama

Kramer vs. Kramer

Directed by Robert Benton
1979

Meryl Streep rewrote her own courtroom speech because she thought the script had the mother wrong: a custody fight filmed at kitchen-table level, where the child is the only honest party.

★ 5.5
Legal drama · Drama

Witness for the Prosecution

Directed by Billy Wilder
1957

The closing credits ask the audience not to reveal the ending, and audiences mostly obeyed: Wilder turns an Agatha Christie courtroom into a comedy about a barrister who is supposed to be resting.

★ 5.8
Legal drama · Drama

Anatomy of a Murder

Directed by Otto Preminger
1959

The Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph Welch plays the judge and Duke Ellington wrote the score: a murder trial turning on an alleged rape, argued in language so frank that 1959 audiences were shocked.

★ 6.5
Legal drama · Drama

12 Angry Men

Directed by Sidney Lumet
1957

Nothing beats it as a filmed argument, and it happens in a single room: eleven jurors want to go home, one will not, and the temperature keeps rising.

★ 8.7