4/5 Dark, Intelligent Melodrama
  by MarlowesMom (San Francisco)
This movie hits hard, especially in today's miserable economy. Two brothers, desperate for money for different reasons, plot to rob their parents' suburban jewelry store. The brothers have grown up in the business so they know how to fence the jewels, they know their way around the store and its schedule, and the parents are insured, so the brothers will get what they need (or think they need) and no harm done. Of course it all goes horribly wrong. The story is old hat but the story-telling structure is thought-provoking, the visual style unobtrusively perfect, and the acting excellent all around, particularly Albert Finney. The audience is challenged to think about the choices we make, what really matters to us, what we might be driven to, and how we delude ourselves that if we can just surmount this or that obstacle, we'll be in clover. The bonus feature about the making of the film is interesting. However, this is uniformly dark, perhaps Lumet's bleakest work since "The Pawnbroker." Don't go looking for anything fun or life-affirming. It's easy to see why this was not a big financial success.

5/5 a good performace
  by Elidio Israel Marquina Ordoñez (Distrito Federal, Mexico)
The title has a basic history, than make remember about the feelings was everyone have inside

5/5 "The Pawnbroker" Redux
  by Peter A. Cohen (Washington, DC)
When you have made as many classic films as Sidney Lumet has, self-conscious filmmaking
stops eons ago. You know a pro when you see a film that does not flash across
each scene: "Wow, look at my editing, look at my script, look at my mise-en-scene,
look at my cinematography, etc., etc...." This is such a film. This is not a collage
of pretty scenes, neat editing and fancy dialogue (which describes 90 % of art-house film
today). This is, in some ways, a conservative film with an almost Art-Deco minimalist and realist
stylism without the wink-wink nod-nod that has, on occasion, even afflicted a Scorsese film
(and all-too-often Coen Brothers films) and has made Tarantino completely unwatchable.
The always topnotch and realible score by Carter Burwell is near perfect. There are many
good postmodern crime and film-noir movies produced in the past 10-20 years; what makes this
film so good is the deft hand of a pro who need not reaffirm any cinematically credibility
that may have been questioned in the past. He doesn't need to and moreover he doesn't care.

5/5 Great Character Study
  by Christy Tillery French (Powell, TN)
Andy Hanson (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) have financial problems. Hank's ex-wife never lets up about the child support he owes and Andy has been embezzling money from his company. Andy's wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei) is depressed and pressures him to move to Brazil, where she believes all their troubles will be over. She's also having an affair with Hank. Andy devises a scheme to steal from their parents' small jewelry store and convinces Hank to perform the burglary. Hank, however, persuades one of his friends to do the actual robbery. Although neither of the brothers expect their mother to be working at the store that morning, she is there, covering for the woman who is supposed to be working. Things go awry from the start and Hank's friend and his mother fatally shoot each other.

Hank has trouble dealing with his mother's death and Andy tries to come to terms over the part he played in her death and the hatred he harbors for his dad. Hank and Andy are fearful of being caught and when Andy learns the IRS is auditing his department, he panics and, from that point on, his life spins out of control.

Excellent acting by Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The movie moves at a fast pace and switches from backstory to the present with ease. Albert Finney puts in a fine performance as the dad and Marisa Tomei, as always, does well in her part.

4/5 If you ever considered knocking over a jewelry store, watch this first and reconsider
  by Joseph P. Menta, Jr. (Philadelphia, PA USA)
An engrossing, extremely well acted, but very dark film. For you fellow fans of old crime novels, this is the kind of story that would be at home in a Jim Thompson, David Goodis, or James M. Cain book. Flawed characters, broken relationships, hopeless situations, it's all here.

To paraphrase director Sidney Lumet in the well-done "making of" featurette on the DVD, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" is a classic style melodrama, but with "melodrama" being meant in a complimentary sense. That is, the film isn't meant to be campy or overacted, just "amped up", depicting people and situations at their various breaking points.

Lumet also noted in his comments that good melodramas always have the situations driving the characters, not the characters driving the situations. That may be true to some extent here (the characters certainly have to react to a lot of intense developments, which serve to reveal their innermost, hidden traits), but their basic personalities certainly influence the events, too. For example, if Philip Seymour Hoffman's "Andy" character wasn't so cold and calculating, he never would have devised the attempt to rob his parents' jewelry store in the first place, and if Andy's brother wasn't so fearful and jittery (likely due to a lifetime of intimidation by his brother), he never would have brought in his loose-cannon friend to help with the robbery, which of course turned out to be a disastrous move.

In any event, this dark, violent, sexy crime tale is strongly recommended for fans of tough crime tales. Just don't expect hearts and flowers at the end and you'll do just fine.