Whenever people make lists with favourite or best directors, Sidney Lumet hardly ever pops up. That should change. Look at his filmography. He is one of the best directors that ever worked in the industry.

This film is modern noir at its finest. It is bleak, rather disturbing and dark as hell. The story, which unravels in an asynchronous chronology, is multilayered and keeps you guessing due to its fragmented narrative. Only a very talented director can add the much needed coherence a story like this needs.

What Lumet understands very well is to give his actors the right amount of space to inhabit their characters. There is not one weak performance here. The main cast is superb, moved along…

Dear god, what a dismal tale. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is an exercise in taking an instance of 'it can't get any worse, can it?' and making it much, much worse in the very next scene. I certainly don't mean in the quality of the film, which is superb, but in the depths of misfortune one family can sink to. This is tragedy of such magnitude that The Bard himself would be proud, compounded by the fact that all the misfortune is due to greed and ineptitude. Sidney Lumet's swan song deserves a place in the pantheon of 'bleakest films ever,' which makes this familial train wreck all the more morbidly fascinating.

Not a single role here is…

Even though I saw this years ago, I was still completely surprised by everything that happened during this recent re-watch. All I remember from the last time I saw it was that I liked it. This time, I fell head over heels in love. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is essentially a family drama masquerading as a crime drama. Andy and Hank are brothers in very different stages in their lives. When Andy asks Hank to rob a jewelry store, everything goes wrong and the rest of the film is concerned with how their lives fall apart and how fucked up their family is.

This is definitely Phillip Seymour Hoffman's best performance, and that's a big deal. He always…

It's quite astounding to realise Sidney Lumet filmed Before the Devil Knows Your Dead when he was over eighty years old, after five decades as a critically acclaimed director responsible for many genuine Hollywood classics, because though it's often quite masterfully put together it's also filled with the energy & skill of a man five decades his junior - and frankly many directors in their thirties don't make films this good. Sadly it was also Lumet's last film before his death a few years later, but what an epilogue to a triumphant career; this is by turns a carefully lensed, cleverly written, well edited and superbly acted drama ostensibly about a heist gone wrong but primarily about a deeply dysfunctional American…

The truly great directors don't fade away. They keep kicking and screaming and proving people wrong to the very end.

Alfred Hitchcock went back to London and enjoyed the post-Hays Code freedom of being able to make the sleaziest thriller he ever made before turning his hand to a deft black comedy. Stanley Kubrick stuck two fingers up at pop culture and those many who said you couldn't make a serious film with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in it, and proceeded to make one of the greatest films of his career. If not the greatest.

Sidney Lumet, at the age of 83, saw Before The Devil Knows You're Dead released after a string of worthy but under-appreciated films went…

I'm a bit of a sucker for this kind of jigsaw puzzle storytelling but the spell is easily broken if it all doesn't quite come together at the end. And I'm not sure this one does. Albert Finney is the weak link, both in terms of plot (his story is the least interesting) and performance (he's playing fairly generic notes on a fairly generic character). And since at least a fourth of the movie (and the ending!) is devoted to him, he definitely brings it all down a little. I wasn't devastated by the ending, it just made me shrug, "of course".

There is a lot of non-shruggable stuff throughout the movie though. Ethan Hawke and Phillip Seymour Hoffman are…

This was the last movie by one of the best directors of our time, Sidney Lumet. I'm trying to watch more of his work and I had always seen this poster since it was released. I saw it got added to Netflix recently so I finally decided to give it a shot.

I dug Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion. Just everything that could possibly go wrong for these characters kept going wrong. You couldn't even feel bad for them either because some these characters were despicable human beings. It made it really interesting to watch because I kept wanting to know what was next and how everything was going…