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Before the Devil Knows You're Dead | 
| Director: Sidney Lumet
Actors: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Rosemary Harris
Studio: ThinkFilm
Category: DVD
List Price: $27.98
Buy Used: $7.34
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Avg. Customer Rating:  75 reviews
Sales Rank: 546
Format: Ac-3, Color, Dolby, Dvd-video, Ntsc, Widescreen
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 112
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.7
MPN: CAP4875DVD
UPC: 014381487527
EAN: 0014381487527
ASIN: B00112S8RS
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
Release Date: April 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: PREVIOUSLY VIEWED - The DVDs will play 100% or you will get a replacement. The keyword to remember is it is USED first and foremost. This DVD may contain spindle stickers and may have minor scratches - cases, artwork, and disk are not going to be mint condition. LOW COST SHIPPING CHARGES + FAST FIRST CLASS DELIVERY + LOW PRICES = CUSTOMER SATISFACTION! BUY FROM CLOSEOUTVIDEO! WE ARE CELEBRATING OUR 20TH YEAR IN BUSINESS! WE HAVE OVER 14,000 DVD's, VHS, VIDEO GAMES, SOFTWARE, BOOKS AND MORE FOR SALE! ALL OF OUR PRODUCTS ARE 100% FACTORY ORIGINALS, SO FEEL CONFIDENT YOU ARE BUYING FROM PROFESSIONALS INTERESTED IN DELIVERING YOUR ENTERTAINMENT NEEDS.
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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
Product Description
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: CAP4875DVD
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| Customer Reviews: Read 70 more reviews...
unrelentingly grim course to self destruction July 25, 2008
Wow, you can't get much worse than this: a family heads towards utter oblivion and it is completely believable. This is nothing short of agony to watch, bringing up the deepest fears that one might feel about the trajectory of one's life. This is on a par with Death of a Salesman, but updated to include drugs and murder. It is an obvious artistic success, though it might give you insomnia and anxiety. If you want to experience these things, I would recommend this film.
 Film noir american style July 21, 2008
The storytelling in this film is worth comparing to a modern Shakespeare. This is not just some sort of tragedy. This is a tragedy of gigantic proportions. We see fantastic cast of actors (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei and Albert Finney) assembled in this sad family saga. Two brothers, one seemingly well off and married to a beautiful woman and the other a complete loser without career, money and divorced, agree to commit "victimless crime" by robbing their parent's jewelry store. The idea is that the insurance would cover the loss of the jewelry that is estimated to $500,000-$600,000 value. Brothers would take care of their financial responsibilites and start their lives fresh. At least that is the plan, until everything not only fails but spirals down with dizzing velocity. I have not seen film this good since "All the King's Men" came out couple of years ago. This film will shake you in more ways than one.
Frantic, explosive, and poetic - begining to end! July 12, 2008
Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil knows your Dead' is a whirlwind movie with surprises at every corner. Very well written by Kelly Masterson, the storyline relishes in reality, while the characters develop very believably throughout the movie. No black magic here, this movie is all to real. Director Lumet's very satisfying directing makes this movie surprises even Lumet fans.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays Andy. A successful Payroll Manager with a beautiful wife, played by Marisa Tomei, and some expensive drug habits. Ethan Hawke plays Hank, Andy's troubled younger brother: A down-trotten divorce' who spends more money in bars than paying for his child support. The two brothers. Besides their lineage, they share a more common problem - money. To fix this, Andy hatches a plan to rob a jewelry store - only the jewelry store is the one owned by their parents. Since they both know the stores layout, this seems at first to be an easy job. Andy gives Hank an 'advance' to hire a thug to rob the store early one morning. Anticipating only an elderly woman employee opening the store, Hank eagerly waits in the get-away car while the hired hand walks in to take the loot; an estimated $500-$600k.
Then the plan goes way awry.
The simplicity quickly turns into a family tragedy while the characters themselves begin play a game of cat & mouse with the law, their family, and with themselves; avoiding their obligations and while confronting a growingly uncertain future.
Hoffman's acting abilities are remarkable in this movie. His character 'Andy' is all too believable and all to human. Too, Ethan Hawke's apprehensive and confused 'Hank' shows Hawke coming into form as a Hollywood A-list actor. He was perfect for this part. Marisa Tomei's frank, and vivid scenes, show her amazing acting talents as a trophy-wife having an affair while a drug-induced husband sails through life giving her mere luxury; without fulfilling her basic needs only her lover (Hank) affords her.
Albert Finney plays a tour-de-force as Andy and Hank's Dad. His character's persistence unravels the truth, and ultimate discovery, that tears the family apart. The ending of " Before the Devil..." is pure poetic justice.
While not a box office standout, this movie deserves more credit than it received. "Before the Devil knows your Dead' is a masterpiece: Both engrossing and, most importantly, very believable.
I highly recommend this movie!
A Way You'll Never Be July 12, 2008
This movie starts off with a bang, literally. Andy Hanson (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is sharing an intimate moment with his wife (Marisa Tomei). Its an intense but totally emotionless scene. It is emotionless because Andy does not make connections with people. Andy doesn't feel, and he thinks he is alive only when he is able to make some kind of impact on another's life. But his wife is equally remote, and equally dysfunctional, and their "relationship" is simply a collison of two souls damaged beyond repair.
The rest of the film is the story of what happened to Andy Hanson to make him this way.
We slowly learn that highly successful older brother Andy Hanson never could please his demanding dad (Albert Finney), and to make matters worse younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke), despite being incompetent at everything he tries to do & incapable of even having an idea that he could call his own, receives all of the love mother & father & sister have to give. Even Andy's wife, an almost always topless/bottomless (or both) Marisa Tomei, prefers Hank and meets him every Thursday afternoon.
Andy's life is thus a living hell, and he tries to ease the pain with the only thing that seems to give him peace & love & everything else that life denies him: heroin.
Nothing in Andy's world is right (at one point he says that none of the pieces of his life fit together) and in a kind of last gasp effort to make things right once and for all he comes up with a plan.
What is brilliant about this film is that we know that Andy is seeking his own kind of redemptive justice (ie revenge against all those whom he perceives to be unfairly against him) and we also know that whether the plan goes right or wrong Andy's intentions will be realized. What we don't know, and what is brilliantly realized in scene after scene, is the depth of Andy's pain & the extent he will go to make things "right" in his world. Andy thinks he has hit bottom, but with each step of his plan he sinks lower and lower. Ironically, his attempt to make things right slowly destroys (what is left of) him.
Sidney Lumet made his reputation with DOG DAY AFTERNOON & SERPICO & THE VERDICT (and about twelve other masterpieces), and yet late in his career he manages to make a film that is fresher than any Independent film I've seen since HARD EIGHT.
And what I love about this film is that it shows the results of choices & actions (something very few crime films do). The intitial action here was a father's refusal to love his son, and the result was a psychic breakdown that took years to reach its crisis point. This film is that crisis point. Philip Seymour Hoffman astonishes in a performance that is so real that you almost have to look away. But you won't.
An Oscar worthy performance in an Oscar worthy film.
May you be in heaven half an hour... July 11, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a thoroughly diabolical tale of just how bad things can go wrong. A simple robbery. Pick up some serious change. Get our finances together and everything will be hunky-dory. But--mom and pop's jewelry store? No problem. Insurance pays for it all. No guns. Nobody gets hurt. Easy money.
Older, more successful (it would appear) brother Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has a few minor problems. Heroin addiction, cocaine habituation. A wife (Marisa Tomei) that...well, he can't seem to perform for. His flat belly days long gone. Younger, sweet, slightly dim-witted brother, Hank (Ethan Hawke) with a few dinero problems of his own. Behind in child support payments for his daughter, in debt to friends and relatives, not exactly wowing them in the work of work, etc.
Sydney Lumet, in this performance at the age of 82 (!), directs and gets it 99.99 percent right, which is hard to do in a thriller. I have seen more thrillers than I can remember and most of the time the director gets the movie printed and lives with the plot holes, the improbabilities, the cheesy scenes, and the hurry-up ending. Here Lumet makes a thriller like it's a work of art. Every detail is perfect. The acting is superb. The plot has no holes. The story rings true and clear and represents a tale about human frailty that would honor the greatest filmmakers and even the Bard himself.
Hoffman of course is excellent. When you don't have marquee, leading man presence, you have to get by on talent, workmanship and pure concentration. Ethan Hawke, who is no stranger to the sweet, little guy role, adds a layer of desperation and all too human incompetence to the part so that we don't know whether to pity him or trash him. Albert Finney plays the father of the wayward sons with a kind of steely intensity that belies his age. And Marisa Tomei, who has magical qualities of sexiness to go along with her unique creativity, manages to be both vulnerable and hard as nails as Andy's two timing wife. (But who could blame her?)
It's almost a movie reviewer's sacrilege to give a commercial thriller five or ten stars, but if you study this film, as all aspiring film makers would be well advised to do, you will notice the kind of excessive (according to most Hollywood producers) attention to detail that makes for real art--the sort of thing that only great artists can do, and indeed cannot help but do. (By the way, I think there were twenty producers on this film--well, maybe a dozen; check the credits.) All I can say in summation is, Way to go Sydney Lumet, author of a slew of excellent films, and to show such fidelity to your craft and your art at such an advanced age--kudos. May we all do half so well.
Okay, the 00.01 percent. It was unlikely that the father (Albert Finney) could have followed the cabs that Andy took around New York without somehow losing the tail. This is minor, and I wish all thrillers could have so small a blip. Also one wonders why Lumet decided not to tell us about the fate of Hank at the end. We can guess and guess. Perhaps his fate fell onto the cutting room floor. Perhaps Lumet was not satisfied with what was filmed and time ran out, and he just said, "Leave it like that. It really doesn't matter."
And I think it doesn't. What happens to Hank is not going to be good. He isn't the kind of guy who manages to run off to Mexico and is able to start a new life. He is the kind of guy who gets a "light" sentence of 10 to 20 and serves it and comes out a kind of shrunken human being who knows he wasn't really a man when he should have been.
See this for Sidney Lumet, one of Hollywood's best, director of The Pawnbroker (1964), The Group (1966), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), and many more.
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