Sidney Lumet's new picture, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead (starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, and Marisa Tomei) is a stunning film. It manages to capture the massive drama (specifically tortuous, anguishing wrongdoing) that a very small period of time can hold within itself, better than nearly any film I've seen before. Then, it proceeds directly to spin it's plot wildly out of control in a beautiful one-two punch. The style is strong and artful and it's a film that's certainly going to rank high on my eventual tops of 2007 list.
It finally got me off my seat to check out the new DVD of one of his early masterpieces, Prince of the City. Also a movie with a very strong visual style (think the machismo of someone like Michael Mann, who I actually like a lot less), this nearly three hour tour-de-force is interesting because of its richly understated character studies, and the fact that the whole thing plays like a mob epic, except it's all about police detectives. This is great precedent for anyone interested in HBO's The Wire as a brave and accomplished work of cinema.
!, Tom, excellent reviews.
Comment by c — January 31, 2008 @ 11:57 pm