Review
Culture
When the Devil You Know Turns Out to be Family
Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman play dissimilar brothers, desperately in debt in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Will Hart/Thinkfilm hide caption
Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman play dissimilar brothers, desperately in debt in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.
Will Hart/ThinkfilmBefore the Devil Knows You're Dead, a robbery thriller directed by Sidney Lumet, is perfectly weighted and expertly crafted.
It's a crime-and-punishment story starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman as brothers who are desperately in debt; when Hoffman's character talks Hawke's into a scheme to alleviate the cash crunch, events go from very bad to even worse — to as grotesquely awful as possible.
Under Lumet's sympathetic direction, the brothers' anguish gets into the viewer's bloodstream, and the movie transcends melodrama.