Review: Clint Eastwood Crafts a Morally Minded Courtroom Drama With ‘Juror #2’
Clint Eastwood’s supposedly final film delves deep into the concepts of truth and justice
Like thousands of film fans around the world, Clint Eastwood’s cinema changed my life for the better. His work has been a constant since I first became interested by film, since I stumbled quite innocently across masterpieces like Million Dollar Baby and were floored by their astounding formal qualities and their powerful emotional blasts. That film, not only starring Eastwood as an aging boxing trainer who sees a daughter figure in Hilary Swank’s working class boxer Maggie Fitzgerald, was also directed, produced and composed by Eastwood, a star so commonly brought up in my house that we refer to him simply as Clint these days, as though he’s readily available on the other side of the phone. He was the first director whose work I loved enough to write about every single film he ever directed — all 40+ of them! — in a handful of lengthy articles I penned back in my first year of college, and my love for him and his work has never dwindled since. By now, I have almost seen every film he has appeared in as an actor, too, with DVD copies of Two Mules for Sister Sara and Paint Your Wagon basically being saved for rainy days on my shelf, my last hesitances to finish all…
