Reception
...And Justice for All scores 78% on Rotten Tomatoes, 58/100 on Metacritic and 23/30 on Zagat. Empire magazine calls it a "solid but slightly clichéd courtroom drama" and rates it 3 stars out of 5. The film was a box-office success. Produced on a modest budget of $4 million, it grossed more than $33.3 million in North America, making it the 24th highest-grossing film of 1979.
Robert Osborne of The Hollywood Reporter raved, "The film is loaded with virtues...it has all the makings of an enormously popular movie." Roger Regent, a French critic, called it one of the most remarkable and important films of the season. Dewey E. Chester of the New Pittsburgh Courier drew parallels to the Watergate scandal and the recent arrest of a state politician on a sodomy charge.
According to Newsday, most critics did not like the film. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times felt that the film was so overstuffed that it was an "anthology" held together by "one of those high-voltage Al Pacino performances that's so sure of itself we hesitate to demur." He concluded, "The closing courtroom scenes are constructed as a machine to make the audience cheer, and the machine works." Vincent Canby of The New York Times described the general hysteria of the actors as if they had been directed to play "the last act of Three Men on a Horse". He calls Pacino's character Kirkland "a hyperventilating idiot" and speculates that everyone in the film has "such low thresholds of emotional distress that I wouldn't trust one of them to see The Sound of Music unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian." Variety said that the film's blend of comedy and drama was unsuccessful but not incompetent.
One critic mused that it was as "commercial as a 60-second K-tel ad and as utterly devoid of substance as a lawyer's opening statement." The Jewish Advocate compared the film unfavorably to The Hospital for its inability to match Paddy Chayefsky's mordant screenplay. The reviewer described the ending as "a bad Perry Mason television show". The Boston Globe lamented the film's inability to be a legal version of Catch-22 and faulted the director. "...And Justice For All spills its potential drama all over the screen and Jewison never stops to clean up the mess."
The film has been read as a commentary on the outsider status of Jews in the WASP-dominated judicial system. William Schoell pointed to Kirkland's reaction to Ralph Agee (Robert Christian)'s suicide as one of the "strongest scenes Pacino has ever played" and gives the actor credit for "triumphing over an impossible script". Brian W. Fairbanks also called the film's screenplay "overly contrived".
The film received two Academy Award nominations. Al Pacino was nominated for Best Actor and Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson were nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 52nd Academy Awards. Pacino was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama for his performance at the 37th Golden Globes.
