Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

"Most directors do not go on to make one of their best films after receiving their lifetime achievement Oscars," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. Sidney Lumet's "first feature, 12 Angry Men (1957), earned him an Oscar nomination for directing. His latest, a bracingly bleak crime melodrama called Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (set to open Friday), has been upstaging filmmakers less than half his age on the festival circuit this fall.... While slipping from one genre to another he has remained very much a New York filmmaker, not just in his preferred locations but also in his politics, his temperament and his work ethic."

Updated through 10/28.

"On the occasion of his bloody and tumultuous new film," writes New York's David Edelstein, "critics have hailed the 83-year-old director Sidney Lumet as an American master, generously neglecting to mention that for every great picture (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon), there have been maybe four breathtaking stinkers (The Wiz, Equus, Deathtrap, Family Business, Guilty As Sin, Gloria, A Stranger Among Us, Garbo Talks...). I note Lumet's batting average to underscore his present achievement. His touch in Before the Devil is so sure, so perfectly weighted, that it's hard to imagine him capable of making a bad movie. The thing is just enthralling. It's a crime-and-punishment story that is finally about (to borrow an earlier Lumet title) family business: primal injuries that lead, inexorably, to primal sins."

"Despite the oscillation between past and present, Devil is so feverishly acted that it feels as if it were always hurtling into the future," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "Devil is devoted to the chaos unleashed by a single terrible idea. The fractured time scheme brings out the unsurprising but still enlightening lesson that crime should be left to the professionals, and that greed humbles smart-asses like Andy, who think they're invulnerable."

"Philip Seymour Hoffman has carved out a special niche for himself as a character actor in contemporary Hollywood, and his Andy Hanson in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is quintessential," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Pervy, belligerent, self-loathing, substance-dependent, greedy, oily, spiteful, pathetic — he is an omnibus of Hoffman types and tropes." Even so, "For all of their greed and stupidity, and all of the usual rashness that money inspires in those who need it (and need it quickly), Hank [Ethan Hawke] and Andy are still highly sympathetic (if pitiable) characters."

"As embodied by Hoffman, Andy is a clusterfuck of First World Problems - a failing marriage, financial overextension, and piteous delusions of grandeur," writes Brendon Bouzard at Reverse Shot. "It's a showy role, yes - Hoffman pounds on tables, weeps pathetically, shouts wildly - but Lumet's elegant staging and Hoffman's commanding presence depict one of the most recognizably tragic figures on screen in recent memory."

"Kelly Masterson's relentless script takes a turn into near-Greek tragedy, which the film can't quite sustain; the final developments beggar belief, and a fetching Marisa Tomei, as a femme sort-of fatale, is stranded by indecisive screenwriting," writes Robert Cashill. "But this slick, sick picture, with a gallery of supporting rogues including Brian F O'Byrne, Amy Ryan and Michael Shannon, is largely satisfying."

"It's a bluntly effective, methodically detailed B movie that proves Lumet's continued fidelity to a tried-and-true credo: all institutions corrupt," writes Akiva Gottlieb at Slant. "In the case of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, that institution is the American family, and its victims are everywhere."

For Brandon Fibbs, writing at cinemaattraction, this is "very possibly his strongest work in decades."

"The robbery goes horribly wrong, and the tension that Lumet builds around the events that unfold in jagged, perspective-driven shards works beautifully - until it doesn't," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler.

Earlier: Reviews from early September and then Toronto and NYFF.

Updates, 10/23: "Auteurists who look down their noses at Lumet's half-century career can reject him on the grounds of his seeming lack of distinctive visual technique, but that sort of tunnel vision ignores his almost unparalleled skill with actors," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "His characters are big and broad, and actors, even good ones, could easy turn into their parts into enormous slices of ham. If the man can keep Al Pacino and Vin Diesel in line, he must be doing something right."

"Hawke's need to ingratiate himself as an actor usefully informs his character; he makes an excellent baby brother, a frisky pup and appealing nitwit whose moist smile and frightened eyes are impossible to resist," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead doesn't always compute, but there's little chance to complain. Even as the shuffled chronology adds to the angst, it's the location of murderous violence within a single family that pushes the action toward Greek tragedy.... Shot like a bleary morning after, full of powerhouse scenes and over-the-top situations in nondescript locales, it's a pulverizing experience."

Updates, 10/24: "If our cultural arbiters are to be believed, the 70s are back," writes Elbert Ventura at indieWIRE. "Directed by someone who actually defined the period, [Before the Devil Knows You're Dead] is no homage by a 'last golden age' devotee - it's the genuine article."

"After Tarantino's genre-remixing Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction inspired a legion of inferior knockoffs, two tropes that many film lovers became quite skittish about seeing combined were 'heist movie' and 'narrative that plays with the timeline.' But a great film can certainly vindicate genres that have been botched by lesser filmmakers." And for Alonso Duralde, writing for MSNBC, this is one of those.

"While a lesser actor might have perished in the subtext, Hawke is lately coming into his own and brings a courageous amount of vulnerability to a performance begging to be picked apart for clues to his private life," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine.

At Stop Smiling, Lawrence Levi breaks with the crowd. Noting all the film's assets, he asks, "So why is it so bad?"

"Hoffman and Hawke both overact to their hearts content, but Lumet's direction is crisp and brutal," writes Nick Schager. "And if the filmmaker's desire to elevate his story to the realm of epic tragedy is neither justified nor successful, his latest nonetheless proves to be a triumphantly brisk, bleak B-movie."

Updates, 10/25: For Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, Before the Devil is "a Rorschach test for filmgoers. What you see in it says more about you than it says about Lumet and his straightforward, throwback-style entertainment, which is richly played and dazzlingly blinged up with sex and drugs, but virtually devoid of human insight or narrative ambition."

"The surge of critical praise for his newest entry in this career-length exploration, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, comes across as appreciation for a devout moralist whose beat hasn't changed after all these years," writes Eric Kohn at the Reeler. "The only element of the film that doesn't work is Lumet's most unexplored terrain: experiments with tension.... Structural flaws aside, the movie contains a flurry of richly directed scenes."

The film opens with "an image meant to shock but is just gruesome" and "goes down the toilet from there," finds Armond White in the New York Press.

Scott Foundas meets up with Lumet for the LA Weekly. So, too, does Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

Online listening tip. Lumet, Hawke and Hoffman are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Updates, 10/26: "Mr Lumet takes what might have been a claustrophobic genre exercise and gives it both moral weight and social insight," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "His great New York movies of the 1970s and 80s - Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, Q & A - were realist fables, often based on true stories and always full of dense local knowledge. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is relentlessly focused on the terrible events of a few days, but as it zigzags back and forth in time it takes in a larger, longer story, a history of upward mobility and family displacement."

"Lumet's fascinated by lived-in spaces - from suburban kitchens with food containers stacked near piles of books, to high-rise drug dens that look hermetically sealed - and he and Masterson continually emphasize how in New York everything costs more than even rich people can afford," writes Noel Murray at AV Club. "Ultimately, the film is just a smart caper picture with some good performances, but at times it's very smart, and Hoffman's performance in particular is one of the most natural and unexpectedly affecting that he's given in years."

"Stop to think of it and you realize that Before the Devil Knows You're Dead... is some kind of ultimate answer to the 'family values' poppycock that has polluted our socio-political discussions for so many years," writes Richard Schickel for Time.

Updates, 10/27: "Fall 2007 is shaping up to be the season of illogical movies," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "First there was the much-praised Gone Baby Gone, which has a third act twist that's logically crazy and impossible in practicality, and now there's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a film from the aging non-master Sidney Lumet that twists its narrative into a pointless and annoying timeline-pretzel and in doing so drains every ounce of energy and motivation from the piece, only to arrive at a Greek tragedy climax that has a plot hole so large you could drive a Hummer through it."

And Looker passes along a friend's complaint.

Updates, 10/28: Mark Olsen profiles Lumet for the LAT.

"When I think about Lumet and the tragedy, I flash back to Long Days Journey into Night (1962)," writes Kathy Fennessy at the Siffblog. "More so than his '70s-era police pictures and corruption classics (Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network, etc), Before the Devil Knows You're Dead evokes Eugene O'Neill, Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare, and even a few of those Greek guys."

Posted by dwhudson at October 22, 2007 2:43 AM