When Twelve Angry Men was first shown as a live television drama on CBS in 1954, Leonard Traube, in Variety, wrote one of the first of the many positive reviews the play was to receive. As he puts it, "Seldom in TV history has a story been able to achieve so many high points with such frequency and maintain the absorbing, tense pace."

When Rose revised the play and co-produced a movie version with Henry Fonda in 1957, critical response was also positive. The reviewer for Newsweek calls the film a "hard, emphatic, single-minded drama of extraordinary drive and fascination." In America, Moira Walsh describes it as "continuously absorbing…. It is well constructed and abounds in forceful and abrasive characterizations." However, the film was not an immediate popular success and was quickly withdrawn from large theaters. Subsequently, it was shown at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won first prize. It also won prizes in Japan, Italy, Australia, and other countries. Since then, it has established a reputation as one of the significant films of the 1950s and an all-time American classic film.

Revised by Rose, the play was revived in 1996 at the Comedy Theatre in London, directed by the noted British playwright and director Harold Pinter. The reviewer Matt Wolf, in Variety, finds the play a "startlingly innocent work in its belief in a fundamental integrity to the legal process." He contrasts this with the disillusionment felt by many in the United States in the mid-1990s, after the controversial acquittal of O. J. Simpson on double-murder charges in 1995.

The play was revived again at the American Airlines Theater in New York in 2004. John Simon, writing in New York, praises the strong writing and the characterization and the "underlying faith in democratic procedure not neutralizing the frightful precariousness of its realization." He concludes:

This superficially dated but fundamentally self-renewing play is more than a lesson in civics and shrewd analysis of a cross-section of psyches. It is a nudge toward our leaving the theater a bit better than we entered it.