Thrills and spills abound in legal thriller Juror #2, airport actioner Carry-On

The story: Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood's 40th directorial feature has a juror (Nicholas Hoult) in a high-profile murder trial weighing a crisis of conscience.

- Whang Yee Ling

JUROR #2 (PG13) 114 minutes, available on Max and Apple TV+ ★★★★☆

In Juror #2, a roughneck (Gabriel Basso) in Savannah, Georgia, is charged with killing his girlfriend (Eastwood's daughter Francesca Eastwood) after a spat at a local bar. Her body was later found under a bridge.

Hoult headlines as the nice guy magazine writer-cum-expectant father, who comes to the sickening realisation he was on the same road on the night of the crime and perhaps it was not a deer his Toyota 4Runner had hit in the rain.

The sentence for vehicular homicide is 30 years. So, rather than implicate himself, he sets forth to sway the jury into acquitting the wrongly accused.

But his 11 motley fellow jurors have their own gender and sociocultural biases. They are exhausted, confined for days in the courthouse and, unanimously, voting guilty to get home sooner.

J.K. Simmons' retired detective is the sole sceptic among them. His sleuthing opens the proverbial can of worms, and Toni Collette is the tenacious prosecutor with political ambitions.