Bleakness and Ambitious Storytelling Abound in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead begins with a bank robbery gone awry. A masked man tries to get money out of some mom-and-pop jewelry store while holding an elderly woman at gunpoint. We do not know who any of these people are or what their motivations are. We just know that this is not how things were supposed to go. Eventually, the masked man is shot while the elderly woman is also left deceased. As getaway driver Hank Hanson (Ethan Hawke), seeing that his cohort is dead, drives away in a panic, the frame freezes. From here, writer Kelly Masterson and director Sidney Lumet begin to travel down a non-linear path to show the viewer exactly what went wrong here and why.

Miller's Crossing Is Another Early Coen Brothers Winner

For their third directorial effort, The Coen Brothers (though only Joel Coen is credited as a director) returned to the crime genre that has served them well so many times in their expansive careers. For this particular take on the crime movie formula, they decided to go in the direction of a period piece, setting the tale in the 1920's specifically. Despite being set in the era where the sale of alcohol was banned, the film, entitled Miller's Crossing, was actually taking more cues in its tone and style from 1940's noir features, particularly ones like The Big Sleep involving a single lead character trying to use their wits to make a whole bunch of other peoples agendas work in his favor.