The best Sidney Lumet film?

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Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Still this.

The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965)
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Lumet's powerful treatise on how memory keeps alive the Holocaust within the dead soul of pawnbroker Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger in one of cinema's greatest performances) even while he's living in the heart of Harlem where almost all the people are bought and sold in the marketplace by pimps and gangsters in a universe not that different from a concentration camp. Nazerman believes he's above all the ugliness he surrounds himself with because he just doesn't care, yet things at work and outside of it keep bringing him back to the past where he lost his beautiful wife and two children during WWII. He takes on an apprentice (the wonderful Jaime Sanchez) and tries to teach him how to learn a career but Nazerman's ghosts rear their heads and cause him to turn on the young man with horrible, yet perhaps, soul-saving results. The supporting cast is highly-unusual and terrific (Brock Peters, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Thelma Oliver, Reni Santoni, Raymond St. Jacques, Baruch Lumet, Warren Finnerty, and the mind-blowing Juano Hernandez). The Pawnbroker is a truly unique film which is still powerful today, not only on a human level but as an American piece of cinema which borrows some editing techniques from Alain Resnais and makes them connect with the viewer in an incredibly visceral way, almost as a precursor to the brilliant editing found four years later in Midnight Cowboy.
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01. 12 Angry Men
02. Dog Day Afternoon
03. Network
04. In The Heat of the Night
05. Serpico
06. The Verdict

That's all i've seen, like them all to some degree.
In The Heat of the Night isn't a Lumet movie.



Frankly he's one of the few filmmakers you can do a legit top ten and make some tough cuts

1. Dog Day Afternoon

2. 12 Angry Men

3. Running on Empty

4. Murder on the Orient Express

5. Before the Devil Knows Your Dead

6. The Verdict

7. Serpico

8. Prince of the City

9. Network

10. Deathtrap


How do you feel Serpico and Prince of the City compare?
One is the better story (Prince of the City) the other is the better performance (Al Pacino)



"I smell sex and candy here" - Marcy Playground
Just read something about Serpico, The Prince of the City and Q & A being a trilogy of sorts. I've seen Serpico. Currently in the middle of Q & A. I still have to source Prince of the City. I've seen some of his other films, too. Just can't believe I missed the rest of the trilogy.
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My favorite director ! Nobody did crime drama better.



1. Dog Day Afternoon
2. 12 Angry Men
3. Network
4. Before the Devil Knows Your Dead
5. Serpico
6. Prince of the City
7. The Pawnbroker
8. Murder on the Orient Express
9. Deathtrap
10. Family Business
11. Equus
12. The Verdict
13. The Anderson Tapes
14. Child's Play
15. Critical Care
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.
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4391. The Wiz (every director has their brain fart)



With the exception of The Wiz, it's hard to think of a director with a more impressive resume than Lumet. Most of his films have great re-watch appeal. It's criminal that he never won an Oscar. As for my favorite, I have to go with Network and Dog Day Afternoon is a very close runner-up.