Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Directed by Sidney Lumet (R)

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Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead confirms that Sidney Lumet is, in every sense, timeless, said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. At 83, the filmmaker exhibits the “vigor and cunning and wide-awake elegance of a virtuoso half his age” and has created a brilliant study of good and evil. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play brothers who, desperately in debt, concoct a flawed plan to rob their parents’ jewelry store. But with Lumet in the director’s chair, the film is more of a character study than a crime thriller. The camera becomes “an invisible cage, inviting us to study the behavior of the human animals he trapped inside.” Lumet cleverly fractures chronology by rotating back in time and layering the story with varying perspectives. Quentin Tarantino may use similar devices, but Lumet is the master, said David Edelstein in New York. He does so “not to flout our genre expectations, but to untangle the strands” that eventually compound into a tragedy. His only fault is “allowing his characters to emote like crazy, with the camera close enough to count their nostril hairs.” But that’s Lumet’s nature, said David Denby in The New Yorker. Lumet turns this film into “a volatile farce about schmucks on the loose.” We get to know these crooks well enough not to feel sorry for them.