Courtroom Movies, Ranked

Sidney Lumet's near-single-room debut turns one juror's reasonable doubt into unbearable tension; it was nominated for three Oscars and is preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry.

Gregory Peck won the Best Actor Oscar as Atticus Finch, later voted AFI's greatest movie hero; the film adapts Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Rob Reiner's military-court drama delivers one of cinema's most quoted lines and earned four Oscar nominations including Best Picture, with Jack Nicholson opposite Tom Cruise.

James Stewart plays a small-town lawyer in a frank murder-and-rape trial that broke censorship norms; it drew seven Oscar nominations and a landmark Duke Ellington score.

Billy Wilder's Agatha Christie adaptation ends with one of the great courtroom twists; it earned six Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Director.

Stanley Kramer's dramatization of the Nuremberg judges' trial won two Oscars from eleven nominations, including a Best Actor win for Maximilian Schell.

A comedy that lawyers routinely cite for its accurate procedure; Marisa Tomei won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar as the auto-expert fiancée.

Sidney Lumet directs Paul Newman as a washed-up lawyer chasing redemption in a medical-malpractice case; it earned five Oscar nominations including Best Picture.

Matthew McConaughey's breakout as a defense lawyer in a racially charged murder trial, adapted from John Grisham's first novel and a major box-office hit.

Tom Hanks won his first Best Actor Oscar as a lawyer fired for having AIDS; the film was among Hollywood's first major studio pictures to confront the epidemic.

Jim Sheridan's dramatization of the wrongful conviction of the Guildford Four drew seven Oscar nominations, with Daniel Day-Lewis as Gerry Conlon.

Julia Roberts won the Best Actress Oscar playing the real legal clerk who built a landmark contamination suit against Pacific Gas and Electric.

Francis Ford Coppola directs Matt Damon as a rookie lawyer taking on an insurance giant; a solid, well-reviewed Grisham adaptation if not a genre landmark.

Richard Gere defends an altar boy in a twist-driven thriller; Edward Norton's film debut earned him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe.

A slick Grisham adaptation pairing Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman in their only shared scene, though it trades legal realism for thriller mechanics.

Reese Witherspoon's crowd-pleasing comedy became a cultural touchstone and spawned a franchise, even if its Harvard-Law courtroom is played for fun over fidelity.

Jim Carrey's high-concept comedy was a box-office smash, but the courtroom is pure slapstick backdrop rather than genuine legal drama.

Brian De Palma's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's novel is a legendary bomb, chronicled in the book 'The Devil's Candy' as a case study in Hollywood failure.