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Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: Blu-ray
Brand: Image Ent.
EAN: 0014381491258
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, NTSC, Widescreen
Label: Image Entertainment
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Image Entertainment
Region Code: 1
Release Date: April 15, 2008
Running Time: 117 minutes
Sales Rank: 690
Studio: Image Entertainment
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
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Product Description:
Image Ent. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead [Blu-ray] Sidney Lumets Before the Devil Knows Youre Dead isan exceptionally dark story about a crime gone wrong and the complicated reasons behind it. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are outstanding asbrothers 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. Hoffmans 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 differentvantage 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 persuasivework by an old master.
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
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Film noir american style
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.
Rating: - Frantic, explosive, and poetic - begining to end!
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.
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Rating: - A Way You'll Never Be
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 ... Read More
Rating: - May you be in heaven half an hour...
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 ... Read More
Rating: - A Sharp Cast Led by a Brilliant Hoffman Ignites Lumet's Fever-Pitch Suspense Melodrama
This intensely involving 2007 character-driven suspense drama is like a big, juicy piece of Shakespearean-level steak from a master filmmaker who knows how to draw out uncommonly ferocious, to-the-edge performances from his actors. Consider for starters - Henry Fonda's lone dissenting juror in 12 Angry Men, Katharine Hepburn's delusional Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey Into Night, Rod Steiger's conflicted concentration camp survivor in The Pawnbroker, William Holden's wintry lion in Network, and Paul Newman's alcoholic lawyer in The Verdict. The list encompasses some of the finest screen work of the past half-century, and you can safely add Philip Seymour Hoffman's desperately controlling Andy Hanson to the ranks. At 83, director Sidney Lumet shows no signs of octogenarian fatigue, and in fact, he revels in the melodramatic turns of first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson's thickly plotted script.
The scale of the story is deceptively small as it focuses on the moral compromises that unravel in a family where two brothers have become desperate for immediate cash. Woody Allen followed a similar fraternal dynamic in his last film, the oddly pinched Cassandra's Dream, but Lumet is neither pinched nor cautious in his fierce approach to this inescapable tale of ambiguity and deception. The plot revolves around a crime that was meant to be victimless. Embezzling funds from his real estate company's payroll to keep his neglected wife Gina happy and to satisfy an expensive drug habit, smooth-talking ... Read More
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