“‘The Verdict’ is Lumet’s morality play, a palate-cleanser after the bitter cynicism of his previous film that affirms the fundamental goodness of a few ordinary people within the justice system.”
“‘Prince of the City’ is a taxing, draining experience, but one that is ultimately rooted in very real despair; the system, it argues, has failed. If these characters are the products of the American criminal justice system, then it ought to be blown up.”
“While a number of combat films released in 1943 focus almost exclusively on the male war effort, ‘So Proudly We Hail!’ finds nobility, heroism, anger, racism, sacrifice and camaraderie in its female characters.”
“By creating such a sympathetic, human subject, Lumet deepens the impact of his institutional critique of the justice system; its dehumanizing effect on American society seems all the more tragic when Sonny is its victim.”
“In dramatizing themes of absence and presence so thoroughly, ‘Klute’ embodies a central feature of neo-noir; as a self-conscious revision of a classic film cycle, noir is always both absent and present in neo-noir films.”
“Widmark offers a succession of performances in ‘Kiss of Death, ‘The Street with No Name’ and ‘Road House’ that show a young actor building, then resisting, and then reconciling his own burgeoning screen persona.”
“This is a world where faith, governments, businesses, families and the other institutions humans have built will all crumble, just like human bodies, which will inevitably succumb to their fragility and fall victim to total destruction.”
“Though the polizieschi may seem far away from the quiet nobility of the Neorealist films, with all their sober-minded social critique, they are bound together by the privileging of the real world.”
“With ‘Serpico,’ Lumet becomes a defining chronicler of American institutional corruption, most obviously within the justice system.”
“Exploitation filmmakers like Castellari treat other films like air just waiting to be breathed in. Theft, plagiarism, remix, citation, reference — to these exploiters, they are all the same thing. Everything, these films suggest, belongs to all of us.”
