Devil Will Make You Watch It

Crime drama could net legendary director first best directing Oscar
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 26, 2007 4:56 PM CDT

He may be 83, but in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Sidney Lumet musters the “wide-awake elegance of a virtuoso half his age,” EW's Owen Gleiberman says, producing a vivid crime melodrama critics unanimously place among the year’s best. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play brothers whose botched robbery of their parents’ store “approaches the scope of Greek tragedy,” Slate's Dana Stevens says.

Lumet may finally win that Best Director Oscar, Lou Lumenick of the New York Post speculates, drawing “remarkable, career-best performances” from Hoffman and Hawke. It is, gushes the Christian Science Monitor's Robert Koehler, “one of the great American films of the past decade.” (More movie review stories.)

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