Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
by Sidney Lumet
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rosemary HarrisDirector: Sidney Lumet
Brand: Image Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 112 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-04-15
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: ThinkFilm
Movie Reviews of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Movie Review: Quick toughts
Summary: 3 Stars
I finished watching "Before the Devil..." ten minutes ago. It is relentlessly grim, full of good performances, and sadly misdirected. It blames the individuals for all of their actions, but it hints at the same time at the forces that make them tick. Brothers Andrew and Henry commit some missteps as citizens to ensure happiness, but if you watch closely, it is their women who are pushing them right at the abyss. Gina (Marisa Tomei) and Martha (the first real star from "The Wire", Amy Ryan) escape the story unscathed after crushing their husbands' hopes scene after scene. After all feminism's whining and crying of the last fifty years, it is men here who must kill, rob and suffer even when they're not directly asked to.
In fact, the most remarkable characteristic of this film is not its already outdated fragmentation of the plotline or the desaturated look seen in many other films in the lasts years but the way in which it portrays how individualism in America puts people against each other and makes nobody care about the rest (including the father, a vengeful Albert Finney that seems ready to do what God tells him to). It will seem sacrilegious to some, but I prefer the sensational Vin Diesel in the previous film by Lumet, another reflection about another part of the American psyche, but a more optimistic and funny one.
PD: Andrew (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) could simply ask for a big bank or credit card loan and never pay it back (is not that Citibank was going to chase him to Brazil, you know?)
Summary of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Master filmmaker Sidney Lumet (The Verdict Dog Day Afternoon Serpico) scores big with this absorbing suspense thriller. Oscar?-winner* Philip Seymour Hoffman is Andy an overextended payroll executive who lures his younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) into a larcenous scheme: the pair will rob a suburban mom-and-pop jewelry store that appears to be the quintessential easy target. The problem is the store owners are Andy and Hank's real mom and pop and when the seemingly perfect crime goes awry the damage sends them hurtling toward a shattering climax. System Requirements:LENGTH: 117 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/PSYCHOLOGICAL DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 014381487527 Manufacturer No: CAP4875DVDSidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is an exceptionally dark story about a crime gone wrong and the complicated reasons behind it. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are outstanding as brothers whose mutual love-hate relationship subtly colors their agreement to rob their own parents' jewelry store, and more explicitly affects the anxious aftermath of their villainy when their mother (Rosemary Harris) ends up shot. Hoffman's steely, emotionally locked-up Andy, despite pulling down six figures as a corporate executive, is supporting an expensive drug habit while trying to leave the country with his depressed wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei). Hank (Hawke), a whipped dog of low intelligence, owes back alimony and child support to his ex-spouse. Both men need money and agree to rip off their parents' business, a decision that goes awry and puts both men in various kinds of jeopardy while their mother remains comatose and their father (Albert Finney) lurches along trying to make sense of anything. Writer Kelly Masterson's screenplay employs a perhaps now-overly-familiar time-shifting tactic, jumping around the chronology of the story's events and replaying scenes from different vantage points. The effect is a little tedious but successfully deconstructs the film's drama in a way that shows how such terrible events are directly linked to family dysfunction, old wounds between parent and child, between siblings, that fester into full-blown tragedy. Eighty-three-year-old director Lumet (Serpico) employs bleached colors and scenes of blunt sexuality and violence, adding to the moral rudderlessness and banality of this airless world. If Devil feels a little reductive and insistently grim, it is also a generally persuasive work by an old master. --Tom Keogh
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