Want to know the best Sidney Lumet movies? How about the worst Sidney Lumet movies? Curious about Sidney Lumet box office grosses or which Sidney Lumet movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Sidney Lumet movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Sidney Lumet (1924-2011) is a 5-time Oscar® nominated writer, producer and director. He received a Honorary Oscar® in 2005. His IMDb page shows over 73 directing credits from 1952-2007. This page ranks 43 Sidney Lumet movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts, video games and documentaries were not included in the rankings.
Sidney Lumet Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
- Sort Sidney Lumet movies by co-stars of his movies.
- Sort Sidney Lumet movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Sidney Lumet movies by yearly box office rank
- Sort Sidney Lumet movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations each Sidney Lumet movie received and how many Oscar® wins each Sidney Lumet movie won.
- Sort Sidney Lumet movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Sidney Lumet Table
- Five Sidney Lumet movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 11.63% of his movies listed. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is his biggest box office hit.
- An average Sidney Lumet movie grosses $47.90 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 27 Sidney Lumet movies are rated as good movies…or 62.79% of his movies. 12 Angry Men (1957) is his highest rated movie while Lovin’ Molly (1974) is his lowest rated movie.
- Twelve Sidney Lumet movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 27.90% of his movies.
- Three Sidney Lumet movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 6.97% of his movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score is 40.00. 14 Sidney Lumet movies scored higher that average….or 32.53% of his movies. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) got the the highest UMR Score while Garbo Talks (1984) got the lowest UMR Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Sidney Lumet
1. Sidney Arthur Lumet was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1924.
2. Sidney Lumet served the United States Army as a radar technician in the Far East during World War II.
3. Sidney Lumet began his directorial career in Off-Broadway productions, then became a highly respected TV director. His first movie was 1957’s 12 Angry Men 12 Angry Men is currently ranked as the 5th best movie on IMDb.com.
4. Sidney Lumet was nominated for 5 Oscars® (4 directing & 1 writing) and 6 Golden Globes® (all for directing). He won the Golden Globe® for 1976’s Network.
5. Sidney Lumet’s Honorary Oscar® was for his “brilliant services to screenwriters, performers, and the art of the motion picture.”
6. Sidney Lumet was considered “an actor’s director”. Want proof? Lumet’s movies earned a combined 41 Oscar® nominations. 18 of those nominations was acting nominations.
7. Sidney Lumet directed 17 different actors in Oscar®-nominated performances: Katharine Hepburn, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino (two times), Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Chris Sarandon, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Beatrice Straight, William Holden, Ned Beatty, Peter Firth, Richard Burton, Paul Newman, James Mason, Jane Fonda and River Phoenix. Bergman, Dunaway, Finch and Straight won oscars for their performances in one of Lumets movies.
8. Sidney Lumet was married 4 times and had two children. His daughter, Amy Lument, is a movie producer while his daughter, Jenny Lument is an actress.
9. Sidney Lumet directed Sean Connery 5 times. He was one of Connery’s favorite directors. Lumet directed James Mason and Jack Warden 4 times. Lumet directed Henry Fonda 3 times as well as Henry’s daughter Jane once. Lumet was one of the first people to use Bruce Willis in a movie. In the following You Tube video you get Saw’s Jigsaw and Die Hard’s John McClane behind and to the right of Paul Newman.
10. Check out Sidney Lumet’s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
Just for Bob: According to Roger Ebert, Sidney Lumet had a theory about why Marlon Brando‘s performances were so uneven. In a review of a bad film starring Brando, Ebert outlined this idea in detail: Lumet said that on the first scene he filmed for any director, Brando would do exactly two takes. In one of the takes, Brando would be putting technical skill and background research into his reading, and in the other he would simply recite his lines as blandly as possible. If the director used the bland take, Brando would proceed to sleepwalk though his performance for the entirety of filming.
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences. Golden Globe® is a registered trademark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.
For comments….all you need is a name and a comment….please ignore the rest.
STEVE If you have a link to your Lumet video I would be glad of it BOB
1 HI BRUCE. Caught your “Just for Bob” paragraph and It pleased me that I should get a mention on this page in particular as Lumet is one of my favourite directors and I am delighted that he has joined the pantheon of great directors to be honoured with a Cogerson page. Also I now have a BRAND [no pun intended] NEW Mumbles anecdote to share in discussions with my movie buff brothers and friends.
2 No doubt Hirsch would again have disapproved of the tactic that you describe but Joel should have been told that the proof of the pudding is not in his own prejudices but in the eating and in that respect it has often been said that Mr Mumbles was “big enough to get away with calling the shots” on set. As Frasier’s dad said in an episode of the sitcom referring to his US sporting heroes “The great ones write their own rules.”
3 In a way now that I am aware of it the MB’s tactic reminds me of the Emperor Caligula who it is claimed made his horse a Senator to demonstrate what he thought of the Roman Senate of his time. However as this is Sidney’s site let’s leave the final word in this post to him as conveyed in one of those MB videos to which you kindly gave me a link some weeks ago. Discussing their collaboration on the 1960 The Fugitive Kind Sid opined that any director who had worked with Brando needed to be prepared to “expect constant surprises from a talent of that size” He went on to praise Mr. M’s perseverance with “a long and beautiful speech” in the film as being “wonderfully courageous”. {Take note Mumbles Lensman in particular].
4 Direct comments on the substance of your Lumet page will follow in a separate post.
Bob, I’ve found the video it’s not a ratings countdown, box office instead. I can’t link it here. But if you go to my home page and look for the magnifying glass symbol next to the word ‘About’ under the main banner, you can type in Lumet and it should come up.
Thanks Steve.
Hey Steve….anytime you want to share a link….just do a quick comment….yes it will send the comment to my approval box…but I usually get them approved pretty quickly….Laurent has been taking advantage of that recently..
Here is Steve’s Lumet video…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72SrcVwFXMo
Thanks Bruce, I might give that a go one day.
It works Steve….I tell ya….it really works…lol.
Hey Bob.
1. When I was looking for interesting facts…..I came across that Brando tidbit….it was originally not going to be included…but then I thought…maybe Bob has not read that before.
2. Glad to know that you had not heard that Brando tidbit before…..not thinking that happens to often.
3. Keeping Joel Hirschhorn alive….love it….even if it is to disagree with him.
4. I have attached Steve’s Lumet video link in another comment….but here it is again in case you could not find it….https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72SrcVwFXMo
5. It is amazing how many of my UMR pages are connected with Mr. Brando….maybe he was an influential actor after all….lol.
🙂
HI BRUCE 1 Thanks for your counter feedback and the link. I couldn’t find Steve’s Lumet and I’ll now be able to ‘review’ it tomorrow.
2 Actually I think for once Joel and I might be potentially on the same side. Whatever disappointment Bud may have had with any of his directors I think it was unprofessional and irresponsible of him to wilfully give a bad performance as that was unfair to the paying public though Hirsch probably wouldn’t have praised it even if it had been a masterclass of acting!
3 There was though another scenario in which I feel MB HAD at least some moral standing for exercising his star power. As is well documented both Coppola and the Salkinds tried to cheat him out of his legally entitled share of the profits from Superman & Apocalypse and he had to take court action to prise the money out of them so to prevent that happening again he demanded his money up front form 1980 onward, for example —
(1) He secured a $3 million fee for The Formula in 1980 and it had to be paid off to him in instalments ON SET before each day’s work. When co-star George C Scott was asked if he would have liked that arrangement he wryly replied “I’ll say!”
(2) As we’ve discussed before Bud’s Irish located movie Divine Rapture folded before completion in 1995 as it ran out of finance and none of the cast got paid apart from Mr Mumbles [albeit partially] because of his up-front arrangement. Debra Winger whom it left in dire financial straits claims she sued but was told “No more money in the kitty” the last million having apparently gone in a few instalments into old Mumbles’ bank account. Apparently he and that $i million quickly vanished from Ireland once he realised there was not more booty for him there!
Hey Bob….good feedback…..good to know that you and Joel can be on the same side of the fence ever once it awhile….lol. As always you have shared some good points on Mr. Brando. 🙂
I’m pretty sure I did a video on Sidney Lumet a year or two ago. Good director.
I’ve seen 9 of the 43 films here, I expected more. Favorites include – Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Serpico, Fail-Safe, A Dozen Angry Men and Murder on the Orient Express.
My favorite and most watched film from that bunch is Dog Day Afternoon, I was a big Pacino fan in my youth and that was one of his best films. Good to see Dog Day doing well on the charts above.
Serpico had the iconic poster of the bearded Pacino, seemingly the only cop in New York that wasn’t corrupt.
Orient Express has been remade by Kenneth Branagh and it’s out later this year, but if you’ve seen the original there won’t be many surprises in store unless they’ve re-written Agatha Christie’s novel.
Fail-Safe was over-shadowed by Dr Strangelove which came out the same year, it’s worth a look but IMO completely unlikely that any US president would agree to do that to avoid a nuclear war.
Another top job Bruce. Vote Up!
Hey Steve. Thanks as always for stopping by and commenting. Tally counts: 21 for Lupino and 19 for me….9 for you Flora comes in at 8. Of your favorites…..Murder on the Orient Express, 12 Angry Men and Fail-Safe are ones I enjoy often. As for Dog Day Afternoon….I unlike you have never been a huge Al Pacino fan….but it is indeed a classic. For a very long time it was in the UMR Top 100….it has since fallen from that lofty perch….but it is still ranked 101st….thought the last time I update that section was on Feb. 17th 2017. So it might be a few pegs down since then. Running the overall rankings is one of the features of the website that takes the longest…so I only do it so often.
Brangah’s remake of the Orient Express is off to a good start….the trailer was very popular. Looking at the trailer…it looks like Johnny Depp is in the Richard Widmark role. I actually like Fail-Safe more than Strangelove. Seems like the current times are the perfect time to remake either of those movies….thank you North Korea.
Good feedback as always.
I haven’t seen a lot of his films except a few of his most famous ones. His body of work is pretty impressive especially the Top 5. Attica! Attica! Attica! Just watched The Pawnbroker a few days ago and really thought highly of it, though it is pretty depressing.
Hey Ellis….thanks for stopping by and commenting. Attica and I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore are two fixtures of movie history. I agree his Top 5 is very impressive….and his Top 10 is pretty stout too. I also agree with you on The Pawnbroker….one of Rod Steiger’s best performance…..but not a lot of joy in that movie.
I have seen 21 of the listed movies. Favorites include 12 angry Men, The Hill, Garbo talks, Fail Safe, Murder on the Orient Express, The Verdict, A View From The Bridge and The Fugitive Kind. Others I’ve seen and liked well enough are The Group, The Anderson Tapes, The deadly Affair, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico and The Morning After. As an actor, I’ve seen his first and his last movie (which pretty much sums up his acting career) – as Sylvia Sidney’s brother in One Third of the Nation and his stint in the remake of Manchurian Candidate. Great addition to this site!
Hey Lupino…..your tally is just barely ahead of me…21 for you and 19 for me….with Flora coming in at 8. I have not seen A View From The Bridge or The Group….actually I have never even heard of them before doing this page. Bob will be happy to see you list The Fugitive Kind amongst your favorites…I have not seen that one either….but I have at least heard of that one.
Ah….that explains something. Everytime I do a new page….I always do a google search on the new subject….just see if Google would try and connect to our website BEFORE doing the page. In this case…when I typed….”Sidney Lumet UMR” into google….Sylvia Sidney Ultimate Movie Rankings was the first google suggestion….I did not understand that connection until reading your comment.
Glad you like our latest page.
I have seen 8 Sidney Lumet movies only. I thought that I had seen more.
My favourite movie is definitely Murder on the Orient Express, one of my favourite films of all times.
Other favourites are The Verdict, Fail-Safe and Twelve Angry Men.
I used to enjoy Network, but I don’t anymore.
Others that I have seen are The Hill, The Anderson Tapes and Death Trap.
Hey Flora
1. I fixed your comment per your request.
2. Thanks for checking out our latest page…and being the first to comment.
3. I have seen 19 of these movies…including the top ranked 16…..then I have only seen 3 of the next 27 movies.
4. Of the 8 you have seen…..I have seen all of them as well. With Fail-Safe, Death Trap, 12 Angry Men and Murder on the Orient Express being my favorites as well.
5. Of the ones you have not seen…that I have….I would say Prince of the City and Before The Devil Knows You Are Dead are great movies…but not a whole lot of fun to watch.
6. I agree Network the movie has not aged as well….though…..”I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” is still heard pretty often….over 40 years old now.
Good feedback.