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12 Angry Men (1957)
: essential video:Sidney Lumet's directorial debut remains a tense, atmospheric (though slightly manipulative and stagy) courtroom thriller, in which the viewer never sees a trial and the only action is verbal. As he does in his later corruption commentaries such as Serpico or Q & A, Lumet focuses on the lonely one-man battles of a protagonist whose ethics alienate him from the rest of jaded society. As the film opens, the seemingly open-and-shut trial of a young Puerto Rican ...
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Verdict (1982)
: essential video:In this 1982 courtroom drama written by David Mamet and directed by Sidney Lumet, Paul Newman found the perfect role for a transitional period of his stellar career. As alcoholic Boston lawyer Frank Galvin, Newman shook off his screen persona as a handsome, blue-eyed hunk to portray an aging, weary man whose best years are behind him, with a shot-glass future that looks very bleak indeed. But when Galvin is given a chance to redeem himself--by proving ...
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Network
: essential video:Media madness reigns supreme in screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky's scathing satire about the uses and abuses of network television. But while Chayefsky's and director Sidney Lumet's take on television may seem quaint in the age of 'reality TV' and Jerry Springer's talk-show fisticuffs, it's every bit as potent now as it was when the film was released in 1976. And because Chayefsky was one of the greatest of all dramatists, his Oscar-winning script about the ratings frenzy at ...
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Murder on the Orient Express
: essential video:Just the name 'Orient Express' conjures images of a bygone era. Add an all-star cast (including Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset, and Lauren Bacall, to name a few) and Agatha Christie's delicious plot and how can you go wrong? Particularly if you add in Albert Finney as Christie's delightfully persnickety sleuth, Hercule Poirot. Someone has knocked off nasty Richard Widmark on this train trip and, to Poirot's puzzlement, everyone seems to have a motive--just the setup ...
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The Group
: :Fans of Sidney Lumet and screen adaptations of 20th-century literature may want to check out The Group, a relatively faithful film version of Mary McCarthy's seminal post-graduate 'campus' novel of the same name. The elliptical and rather familiar plot follows a group of young women--all classmates, friends, and recent graduates from a certain single-sex liberal arts college--as they face the inevitable pressures to sand the rough edges off their personalities and to surrender their independence to the men in ...
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Just Tell Me What You Want
:Description:When his mistress announces her impending marriage to another man, a powerful tycoon does everything in his power to sabotage the relationship.
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The Wiz (1978)
: :Though it may be thought of as sacrilegious to remake a classic such as The Wizard of Oz, this 1978 film directed by Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker, Serpico) is a vibrant and entertaining retelling of the modern fable, featuring an all black cast in the familiar story of a rural small-town girl whose dreams transport her to a magical world where the battle between good and evil gives the real world a sense of perspective. Rendered in the style ...
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Anderson Tapes
: :An early example of the techno-thriller, The Anderson Tapes--sharply directed by Sidney Lumet from the novel by Lawrence Sanders--follows just-out-of-jail Duke Anderson (a balding Sean Connery) as he plots the heist of an entire New York apartment building, enlisting a crew that includes Martin Balsam as a vintage 1971 gay stereotype and a very young Christoper Walken in perhaps the first of his jittery crook roles. The gimmick is that Anderson has been out of circulation so long that ...
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Fugitive Kind
: :An early example of the techno-thriller, The Anderson Tapes--sharply directed by Sidney Lumet from the novel by Lawrence Sanders--follows just-out-of-jail Duke Anderson (a balding Sean Connery) as he plots the heist of an entire New York apartment building, enlisting a crew that includes Martin Balsam as a vintage 1971 gay stereotype and a very young Christoper Walken in perhaps the first of his jittery crook roles. The gimmick is that Anderson has been out of circulation so long that ...
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Vatican Revealed
: :Despite the title, there are (unsurprisingly) no gossipy revelations in this A&E-produced two-video set. What you get instead is a thorough look at the history and culture of the Roman Catholic municipality and its sovereign leader, the Pope. The 53-minute first tape concentrates on the history, exploring the construction of the first St. Peter's Basilica by 800 of Constantine's subjects to honor the crucified apostle above the spot where he was said to be buried. Narrator Mike Farrell details ...
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