Release Date:
10/26/2007
The man who gave the world Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Serpico, and The Verdict, among many other bona fide classics, has done it again—and attention must be paid. Not just because the director in question, Sidney Lumet, is an inspiration who, at 83 years old, has made one of his greatest movies, but also because he has managed to make one of the best crime dramas in recent years. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a broker in over his head who lures his younger brother (Ethan Hawke, in his best performance yet) into a scheme to rob one of those suburban-mall mom-and-pop jewelry stores—which in this case really is owned by their mom and pop (Rosemary Harris and Albert Finney). The idea is, they would get the loot and their unwitting parents would make out okay by collecting on the insurance. Things go terribly wrong when the guy Hawke enlists to actually do the crime gets killed in the process by the woman running the store. Tension escalates as their father pulls out all the stops in seeing justice done, unaware his sons are the culprits. Other plot complications involve Hoffman's wife (Marisa Tomei), who is sexually double-dipping with his brother, even as the siblings just get themselves deeper and deeper into shit. The cast is uniformly excellent right from the first frame, and there's a shocker that graphically shows Tomei and Hoffman doing it doggie-style. Lumet, at an age when most guys are hunched over and dribbling from their mouth, is as hip and lucid a director as any working in movies. It's been exactly 50 years since he made his first one, but let's hope on the basis of this shattering, edge-of-your-seat stuff that he hasn't made his last.