Sidney Lumet was a master of cinema, a storyteller with a natural sense of drama whose emotionally complex films (12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and dozens of others) plumbed issues of morality, justice, and social consciousness. Nancy Buirski (Afternoon of a Faun, The Loving Story) provides an engrossing look at the versatile director through a never-before-seen interview shot just before Lumet’s death in 2011. With remarkable self-awareness and candor, Lumet talks openly about his life, his art, and his influences: a childhood spent acting in New York’s Jewish theater scene, an upbringing by an immigrant father who valued hard work and discipline, an experience on a train in Calcutta during which he witnessed a brutal incident but failed to intervene. Buirski elegantly interweaves these expansive reflections with an abundance of well-chosen excerpts from Lumet’s films, thematically linking the nearly 50 films in his oeuvre and drawing profound connections between the work and its compassionate creator.  EM