Why I think Sidney Lumet is the finest American filmmaker of all time. And also why he couldn’t have been the best poker player.

“His last film, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, a crime drama made when he was 82, opens with doggystyle sex and zigzags through linearity with insouciant vigor. His first film, 12 Angry Men, made nearly 50 years before that, takes place almost entirely in one room, its only perceptible action being a lot of conversation. Lumet did it all, working the genres with indiscriminate thrill, questing only that the style served the subject and not the other way around. And so the stories, too, loved him right back.”

PDF of full article

~

First published Mumbai Mirror, April 13, 2011