Popular reviews

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★ 3

  Action! - Lumet/Pollack: The Fight of the Century

  Maybe it's because the only version I could find was a VHS copy, but something about this looked cheap. As if it were a TV movie rather than a feature picture mean to be play on the big screen.

  Also the film serves for the director dive into legal system corruption, this time focusing on a newly elected district attorney who, like many idealists before and after him, seeks to eradicate corruption in the New York police department, only to run into a slew of extraneous and somewhat personal obstacles. Andy Garcia impresses in this role by selling his character's early cockiness and later his physical and moral decline. The remainder of…

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  Review by Allison M. 🌱 ★★★★ 1

  “I'm just an old cop who maybe should have been put out to pasture long ago.”

  While watching this, I felt like this is the movie The Place Beyond the Pines wanted to be (without all the decade hopping). Sidney Lumet delivers a succinct, clear, tight film with a whole bunch of characters who have varying levels of corruption. Richard Dreyfuss' character reminds me of Ian Holm's character in The Sweet Hereafter, so also having Ian Holm in this film was a bit jarring.

  Also, seeing James Gandolfini was a blast from the past. It felt like he was alive again.

  In closing, Sidney Lumet is a master and this movie is a gift to cinephiles.

  Vegan alert:
  There are scrambled eggs.

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  Review by theironcupcake ★★ 6

  "You were a cop, Joe. Now you're garbage! You are NOTHING!"

  Rule of thumb: if Ron Leibman is in a film's cast and the answer to the question "does Ron get enough screen time?" (even if he makes the most of it by either yelling or getting up onto a chair or bar top to exaggerate said yelling) is "no," you've got yourself a flop. Apologies to Sidney Lumet, but it's true. I found myself feeling nostalgic for his earlier oddity Guilty as Sin, which probably tells you everything you need to know.

  (On the other hand, any opportunity to delight in the sight of Andy García's Wolf Man-esque forest of chest hair? Glorious, simply glorious.)

  Watch Four Films Challenge 2021

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★

  “You want clean hands? Become a priest.”

  I liked this one so much, I wrote a whole piece about it at ScreenCrush.

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  Review by Blake Bergman "Various Spaghetti" ★★★★

  "Night Falls on Manhattan" is 1996 crime drama directed by Sidney Lumet. Lumet, who has taken a look into the internal acumen of the police a few times over with films like "Serpico" (1973) and "Prince of the City" (1981), follows suit once again in this crime and trail narrative. The story is set up on the cusp of a takedown of a major drug dealer that goes increasing wrong. As the events spiraled out of control and became a major public display of error, as the force unnecessarily lost many of their own due to miscalculation. Knowing that the assailant will soon be caught, this is when the narrative points its head to the District Attorney's office knowing that…

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  Review by MichaelEternity ★★★★ 7

  Another lean, intelligent, well-organized examination of crime, politics and the ambivalence of morality that could only come from Sidney Lumet. Maybe it got lost in the shuffle because it doesn't aim for fireworks or actorly grandstanding (well, not entirely anyway), but rather efficient procedural scope. The script covers a lot more ground than movies usually do, and all in under two hours. There's a strong courtroom drama section that occupies barely a fifth of the runtime. It's a movie in clear conversation with Lumet's earlier "Prince of the City" about dirty cops (it could have been marketed as the sequel), plus a precursor to the following year's "L.A. Confidential", with which it shares much of its plot outline.

  With Lumet…

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★

  finds Lumet juggling pieces of Prince of the City and The Verdict in an ensemble driven crime drama that feels tailor made for his strengths as a filmmaker, which is to say that this goes exactly where you expect it to and the reward is the journey, not the conclusion — everyone on screen here is fantastic, but especially Andy Garcia who is clearly channeling his role in Black Rain, from the swagger to the impeccably timed outbursts

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  Review by chavel ★★★

  Night Falls on Manhattan with smooth cat Andy Garcia as a one-time policeman turned district attorney who is handed a case prosecuting the drug peddler who shot and injured his own policeman dad (Ian Holm) during the arrest. His superior, played by Ron Leibman, wants vengeance and publicity hand in hand. During the court procedure, many unsettling and unflattering facts come out on police corruption that would better if left swept under the rug, making it a blood brother companion to Sidney Lumet's earlier 1973 film "Serpico." There is a morality decision that must be made on whether to deliberately taint evidence to protect certain reputations and the precinct itself. Richard Dreyfuss and his big poof of hair is the slimy defense attorney who resembles Alan Dershowitz with a showboat attitude to match, Shiek Mahmud-Bey is his drug hustler client. Also Lena Olin, James Gandolfini, Colm Feore and Frank Vincent.

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  Review by russman ★★★ 1

  Isn't it a conflict of interest for Uncle Junior to be the judge on a case Tony Soprano is connected to?

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  Review by Ian Curran ★★★★ 2

  Lumet, the bard of New York justice and corruption, knocks it out of the park yet again. In ‘Night Falls on Manhattan’ we follow the quick assent of a young assistant district attorney as he rises through the ranks following a high profile murder case. Along the way our young attorney is forced to confront the limits of justice and the necessity of pragmatism while working within the law.

  I really liked this. The plotting is a little overly intricate, but the characters feel archetypal in the best sense of the word, and no one shoots NYC like Lumet.

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  Review by Andy Summers 🤠 ★★★½ 7

  Sidney Lumet's Night Falls On Manhattan has all the ingredients to be a top notch crime drama, and when you look at the cast assembled here, it's a surprise that this didn't resonate more with audiences. Maybe the corruption angle wasn't to everyone's tastes, who knows, but Lumet made a decent film that has more than one excellent performance to go along with Andy Garcia's starring role.

  When a drug kingpin kills two policemen and leaves another fighting for his life in hospital, the district attorney of New York City wants a showcase trial when the perpetrator is brought to justice. He appoints the son of the injured officer as the prosecutor, despite his inexperience, and as the trial becomes…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★½

  "No one cares why you became a lawyer. Only you."

  Night Falls on Manhattan was based on a novel by Robert Daley, who also wrote Prince of the City, and like that movie, it was one of the four movies Lumet wrote himself (the others were Q&A and Find Me Guilty; it is easy to detect a pattern). It has the exact same final scene as the earlier movie, and like it, its more procedural-oriented elements about police corruption are in the service of what is pretty much a simple morality play. So, it is in many ways a revisit—not quite as good, but a pretty compelling one. It is very unusually structured in two halves, whose major plot implications…