A 2024 legal thriller whose paltry distribution was a crime scene of its own convicts Michael Keaton and Joaquin Phoenix on streaming

Here’s the thing about modern moviegoing: everyone likes to complain that no good movies are being made anymore, when in reality fantastic films come out every other day that simply require a bit of effort to access.

But it’s still nevertheless depressing that these fantastic films aren’t more broadly embraced by movie theaters, and end up buried for committing no more heinous a crime than not featuring the Minions or satisfying the nostalgic ego of its audiences. Juror #2 was found guilty of these charges by the Warner Bros. overlords, and Max viewers are now picking up the forced slack in hopes of giving Clint Eastwood’s potential swansong the attention it deserves.

Per FlixPatrol, Juror #2 continues to enjoy itself at the top of the United States’ Max film charts at the time of writing, utilizing its robust drama to keep the likes of a second-place Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and a third-place Joker: Folie à Deux at bay.

Directed and produced by Clint Eastwood, Juror #2 stars Nicholas Hoult as Justin Kemp, a man who regrettably gets called up for jury duty in the middle of his wife’s high-risk pregnancy. The case is one of James Sythe, who’s on trial for the alleged murder of his girlfriend Kendall Carter after a none-too-pleasant fight at a local bar. This bar, being the one that Justin drove home from the night of the murder, and the night of that murder being one where Justin accidentally hit a deer that might not have been a deer. Quel scandale!

To speak of Juror #2 is to accept the fact that you will never unpack it in full. There’s nothing glamorous or indulgent about Eastwood’s direction; every decision he makes and every performance he gets out of his top-notch cast is entirely in service to the most sobering possible reflection on the American justice system.

And within that, the nonagenarian screen legend strikes a devastatingly humanist chord with all the dilemmas faced by the likes of Justin, his peers, his superiors, and the lives that are in his hands. The film ostensibly declares that justice isn’t real, but also more accurately suggests that justice is often so ugly that calling it as such fills us with existential dread. We are all, after all, just trying to do the right thing while staving off our own fundamentally restless conscience, as well as that of a public who must consume tragedy and its gerrymandered resolution to distract from their own emptiness.

To put it simply, Juror #2 is not an easy watch, and unfortunately, easy watches are what’s “in” right now. Indeed, it’s perhaps no wonder that Eastwood’s latest was unceremoniously kicked to the curb when we’re living in the advent of streaming films designed to be understood while you’re looking at your phone. And yet, Eastwood seems to believe that we can all rise to the occasion, and that counts for something.