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Staring: Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Rosemary Harris, Ethan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Director: Sidney Lumet
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Product Details
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 0014381487527
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Label: ThinkFilm
Manufacturer: ThinkFilm
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: ThinkFilm
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2008-04-15
Running Time: 112
Studio: ThinkFilm
Theatrical Release Date: 2007

Product Features
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 proble

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Editorial Review
Product Description
Master filmmaker Sidney Lumet directs this absorbing suspense thriller about a family facing the worst enemy of all itself. Oscar®-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Andy, an overextended broker 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 actual mom and pop and, when the seemingly perfect crime goes awry, the damage lands right at their doorstep. Oscar-winner Marisa Tomei plays Andy s trophy wife, who is having a clandestine affair with Hank. The stellar cast also includes Albert Finney as the family patriarch who pursues justice at all costs, completely unaware that the culprits he is hunting are his own sons. A classy, classic heist-gone-wrong drama in the tradition of The Killing and Lumet s own The Anderson Tapes, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOW YOU RE DEAD is smart enough to know that we often have the most to fear from those who are near and dear.

Amazon.com
Sidney 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

Customer Reviews

Dark, Intelligent Melodrama, 2009-10-26
This movie hits hard, especially in today's miserable economy. Two brothers, desperate for money for different reasons, plot to rob their parents' suburban jewelry store. The brothers have grown up in the business so they know how to fence the jewels, they know their way around the store and its schedule, and the parents are insured, so the brothers will get what they need (or think they need) and no harm done. Of course it all goes horribly wrong. The story is old hat but the story-telling structure is thought-provoking, the visual style unobtrusively perfect, and the acting excellent all around, particularly Albert Finney. The audience is challenged to think about the choices we make, what really matters to us, what we might be driven to, and how we delude ourselves that if we can just surmount this or that obstacle, we'll be in clover. The bonus feature about the making of the film is interesting. However, this is uniformly dark, perhaps Lumet's bleakest work since "The Pawnbroker." Don't go looking for anything fun or life-affirming. It's easy to see why this was not a big financial success.

Into a nightmarish vortex..., 2010-02-11
"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" is directed by Sidney Lumet (Serpico, The Verdict, Dog Day Afternoon). Lumet uses a structure of story telling whereby the events before and after a robbery are told like an eddy in time that swirls around the disastrous pivotal event of the robbery. Time is used like a net that entangles events together as we learn of the circumstances that lead the two brothers, played by Ethan Hawke and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, to plot the robbery. Through Lumet's mesmerizing directing we follow these brothers into the vortex of their greedy self created nightmare as it also drags those they love into this hole of despair.

Marisa Tomei, 2010-02-13
Yeah, ya gotta buy this film for the Marisa Tomei scenes.

The storyline, acting, etc. is just okay. Actually, the plot left me bored.

But the Marisa Tomei scenes...

Genius film by 83-yr-old director, 2009-11-27
The pacing, cinema style, storyline, acting, cutting, directing and overall look of this are stunning. At age 83, Lumet ("Dog Day Afternoon" etc) makes a movie like a 30-year-old would. Hoffman and Hawke are perfectly dysfunctional brothers here. Finney, the old pro as the father, is stunning. The plot is just convoluted enough and the tactic of replaying scenes through the now-familiar concept of time-shifting works very well. There's an operatic quality to the film, and of course, a Shakespearean tragedy going on as the family implodes after the brothers' decision to rob their parents' bland suburban jewelry store. I'd overlooked this upon release. Don't make the same mistake now. Watch!

Corny and stupid, 2010-01-19
Martin Scorcese said that directing is a young man's game. Clint Eastwood seems to be the contradiction, and this seems to be the proof of that statement. Phil Hoffman is supposed to be a cokehead AND a junkie? He doesn't have one believable moment in this flabby and out of touch film. Everything happens in a Hollywood-universe of cliches and over-acting. Marisa Tomei has very nice breasts, though.

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