10 Best Movies That Play Out In Real Time
6. 12 Angry Men
And now we circle back to Sidney Lumet for one of the greatest movies of all time, his 1957 courtroom drama 12 Angry Men.
Almost the entirety of the movie is set inside a single room as 12 jurors debate whether to find an 18-year-old guilty of murdering his father, which would in turn sentence him to death.
There's an elegant simplicity to how Lumet uses real time here, more or less placing the viewer in the role of the metaphorical 13th juror as they listen to the various arguments for and against putting the young man to death.
For a film primarily concerned with themes of empathy and understanding, it's an ingeniously understated use of the technique to elicit identification between the audience and the characters they're watching.