Notes on…

Juror #2(2024)

Dir. Directed by Clint Eastwood


Narratively, Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams show their full hand early, with little regard for suspense – a perverse move that pays off as the film reveals itself as a stern parable of morality and conscience, exhibiting a stony contempt for the vagaries of the American justice system.

[…]

Gradually, the film’s psychological weight shifts from Hoult’s suitably blank slate to a grasping public prosecutor played with chilly force and incrementally crumbling conviction by Toni Collette. As it does so, Juror #2 gains a minimalist, near-Bressonian intensity that belies the autopilot pacing and drab, yellow-filtered televisualism of its direction.

Guy Lodge (Sight & Sound, Winter 2024)


A movie’s ending [can] distinguish itself by coming right at the start, as happens in Juror No. 2, Clint Eastwood’s curiously satisfying throwback to the middlebrow legal thrillers of the 1990s. The most old-fashioned thing about Juror No. 2—but also the most hopeful, and thereby almost avant-garde—is its faith in the American justice system. Toni Collette’s doggedly idealistic district attorney is actually named Faith! In this economy!

Dana Stevens (Slate)


Eastwood is the only major director showing the America that I see whenever I drive through it. He’s practically the only contemporary director whose movies don’t look smothered in post-production digital gloss. He’s a director who will give you a jury whose 12 members are a bluntly symbolic cross-section of America circa 2024, but not give you any non-diegetic music to manipulate your emotions. He’s still a Hollywood director who likes speeches and dramatic twists and thudding irony, but he delivers it all with the same cool temperature and eye-level gaze that is unique to him.

Will Sloan

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Synopsis: While serving as a juror in a high profile murder trial, family man Justin Kemp finds himself struggling with a serious moral dilemma…one he could use to sway the jury verdict and potentially convict—or free—the accused killer.