Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, 2007)

Desperate to fuel their vices, erase their debts and fund escape plans from their lives, two brothers go in on a "victimless crime": knock over the parents' jewelry store, take the money and run, then let the insurance take care of the rest. This goes south, as perfect heists do, when the frightened younger brother hires an edgy thug to hold up the shop for him. The resultant domino line of crises leaves nobody a winner, and some dead.

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This is essentially a soap opera episode, if soap opera episodes had budgets of paper money, were acted by consummate professionals and were directed by Sidney Lumet. (It was shot on video, adding to the lurid daytime-TV vibe. As a follower of digital video technology for nearly a decade, I was thrilled to hear a filmmaker as established — and, er, old — as Lumet say he'd never go back to the pain in the butt that is film.)

Now, I'm no soap fan, but I am a fan of stories where, despite how every character makes what seems to be the rational choice at the time, things trainwreck anyway. The perfect example of this is my favorite film of the Coen Brothers', Blood Simple. (Less perfect, but nearly so, is No Country for Old Men.) Similarly, every plan in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead springs a leak, and every plan to plug a leak causes two more.

It goes like this: the older brother hatches the plan, and strongarms the younger, child-support-crunched brother into performing the robbery himself. Which would be okay, but the younger brother gets spooked and pays off a lowlife buddy to knock over the store while he waits in the car. Which would be okay, but the woman running the shop pulls out a gun, causing a mutually fatal exchange. Which would be okay, but the lowlife has a wife with an extortion-minded brother, and the usual old woman had to do something that day, so the boys' mom was manning the store. Criminal genius that he is, the older brother doubles down, deciding to rob his eccentric young drug dealer and split the country. Which would be okay, but by this point he's out of his mind with paranoia, and his father's hunting him down. Notice how the trouble could resolved by the removal of any one of the problematic elements; this is some Greek stuff.

That the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley is not exactly a revelation, and I, along with every other living film buff, grew weary of heist films around the turn of the millennium. Also, money is the root of something something. Still, Lumet — no pun intended — pretty much pulled this one off. Roger Ebert appropriately wrote, "It keys into three common nightmares: (1) You clean and clean but there's still blood all over the place; (2) You know you have committed a murder, but you are not sure quite how or why; (3) You know you have forgotten a small detail that will eventually get you into a lot of trouble." Sure, he wrote it about Blood Simple, but still.

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1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Anton Corbijn's Control
7. Robinson Devor's Zoo
8. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
9. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
10. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
11. Jason Reitman's Juno
12. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
13. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
14. Greg Mottola's Superbad
15. Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
16. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
17. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
18. Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
19. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
20. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
21. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie
22. J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage