Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead “is one of the best films of the year if only because it does so much with so little,” writes In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. “The story is conveyed in a broken narrative fashion that seems unnecessary at first, but [this] choice oddly enlightens the viewer to the inner workings of the characters at a deliberate and particular pace, allowing for a certain marinating quality. That Lumet is still knocking stuff like this out of the park at his age is becoming almost an expected fact, but there is something special working within the frames of this picture. You just don’t come across a filmmaker able to drill this deep anymore.”

“Sidney Lumet, at 83, may be the oldest director with a film at Toronto this year,” Roger Ebert has written, “but his films are always sharp-edged and constructed with a taut urgency, and now he has made a crime film as good, in its own way, as his Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Find Me Guilty and Serpico.

Ethan Hawke, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Sidney Lumet on set of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

“Like those films, like all of his crime films, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead shakes off the conventions of genre and becomes a study of character. It uses, as Lumet likes to do, superb actors: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers, Albert Finney as their father, Marisa Tomei as Hoffman’s wife, Rosemary Harris as Finney’s wife, and Amy Ryan as Hawke’s ex-wife.

“The brothers both face financial emergencies, and Hoffman concocts a plan to stick up their family’s suburban jewelry store on a Saturday morning, when the staff will be one old lady. His plan: No guns, no muss, no fuss, dad gets reimbursed by insurance, nobody’s a loser, and their problems are over.

“The plan does not quite work out. Kelly Masterson‘s screenplay (her first) uses interlocking flashbacks to see the plan and the problems gradually swelling toward critical mass. And what is so good about the film is the depth of the characters, of the brothers (one nursing old wounds, the other feckless), the father (Finney sounds the depths of the man’s soul) and Tomei (whose marriage is coming apart and she doesn’t know why).

“Lumet started in TV in 1951. His career directing feature films began with the masterpiece 12 Angry Men (1957), and he hasn’t lost one beat in 50 years.”

But Lumet has lost the beat from time to time. The ’90s were not a good period for him — Gloria (’99), Critical Care (’97), Night Falls on Manhattan (’97), Guilty as Sin (’93) and A Stranger Among Us (’92) were all problem films. Q & A — which came out 17 years ago — was the last truly decent Lumet film until Find Me Gulity came along in ’06. And now Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a better film than Find Me Gulity (which is saying a lot) and Lumet’s best since Prince of the City.

A longtime reader writing from Munich is claiming that as of today Bryan Singer, Tom Cruise and the Valkyrie crew have been granted official permission to shoot scenes in the big building in Berlin known as Bendlerblock, where the failed anti-Hitler coup d’etat was coordinated and where the anti-Hitler conspirators were executed by firing squad.

My Munich-based source says he works with a company that is doing business in the entertainment industry, but that the information has come from a friend “who works with the German defense ministry, which is the authority that is located in the very building.” A 9.14 Variety story reported the same thing.

Apparently the German government, which had officially denied the filmmakers access to the building in early July, gave the permit issue a re-think.

Among the scenes to be shot there are the machine-gunning of Colonel Graf Stauffenberg (Cruise) and his co-conspirators.

Note to Singer: Please, please don’t cut away from shots of Cruise and his fellow conspirators getting hammered by all that hot lead. It will be seen as a chickenshit move if you cut away. It’s your show, but I’m sensing that many thousands out there want to see Cruise hit the pavement, even if they haven’t acknowledged this to themselves in so many words. I’m just passing this along..

“An air of irresolution nonetheless lingers around In the Valley of Elah,” writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, “a sorrowful, frustrated sense that the deepest mysteries cannot be contained within any narrative framework. Underneath its deceptively quiet surface is a raw, angry, earnest attempt to grasp the moral consequences of the war in Iraq, and to stare without blinking into the chasm that divides those who are fighting it from their families, their fellow citizens and one another.

“Not that the [film’s] message is ambiguous or unclear. The message is that the war in Iraq has damaged this country in ways we have only begun to grasp. For some people this will seem like old news. Others — in particular those who pretend that railing against movies they haven’t seen is a form of rational political discourse — may persuade themselves that it is provocative or controversial.

“Almost no violence takes place on screen, but there are times when Elah feels almost like a horror film. Its steady crescendo of suspense builds toward the revelation — and vanquishing — of some unspeakable, monstrous evil.

“But since the monster has no identifiable physical shape, it is not so easily defeated. While there are killers, liars and sadists to be found in this movie, there are not really any villains. And there is no reassuring conclusion. If it is anguished, even despairing, In the Valley of Elah is also compassionate. At heart it is a somber ballad about young men who remain lost in a dangerous, confusing place even after they come home.”

HE reader Tim Sherrick has written to ask what happened to my coverage of Michael Moore‘s Captain Mike doc, which I promised I’d get into. What happened was that I had the usual conflicts and deadlines and wound up missing the first screening, and then everyone I spoke to who’d seen it (and I mean everyone) called it a non-essential vanity project.

Does it reflect upon the current electoral situation vis a vis the upcoming Presidential election year? Somewhat but not really, Toronto press-passers all said. Does Moore deal with the fact that while 18-to-29s voted in greater numbers in ’04 than they did in ’00, the vast majority of them stayed away from the polls in droves and in so doing earned the label “generation of shame“? No, everyone said. That’s when I knew I’d wait for a screening back in LA, or perhaps even the DVD.

Many years before committing to play Salvador Dali in Andrew Niccol‘s Dali & I (as reported today on various sites), Al Pacino, who will play the famed surrealist, came somewhat close to making a Dali biopic with director-writer Roger Avary. The Niccol version, set during the waning years of Dali’s life, focuses on his mentor-protege relationship with a young art dealer, Stan Lauryssens (Cillian Murphy), whose book about their relationship is the basis of the film. Niccol directed S1m0ne, one of Pacino’s worst films ever, and Lord of War. Caveat emptor!

“After two features dramatizing the peripheral aspects of Manchester’s greatest rock band, Grant Gee and Jon Savage’s stylish doc Joy Division gets to the heart of the matter,” writes Variety‘s Robert Koehler.

“Pic takes full measure of the extraordinary unit’s music and its unlikely rise to instant-legend status, and has an eye for detail many similar docs simply lack. Theatrical interest in the wake of Anton Corbijn‘s Control will pull in buyers after a strong fest run, and a double DVD of Corbijn’s film and this one seems like a no-brainer.”

Allow me to two-cents this notion myself. Harvey Weinstein should acquire the doc so he can include both Control and Joy Division in a double-disc DVD. I happen to have a DVD screener of Joy Division sitting on my desk as we speak. I haven’t watched it because I haven’t had time to brush my teeth, but I will this weekend.

“If a more facile, stupid, condescending, predictable, smug, exploitive, corrosively despicable piece of wanna-be transgressive horseshit was ever made, then let’s have it, because I really am too old to take on a new profession just to get even with this asshole.” — The Reeler‘s S.T. Van Airsdale expressing rage over Nothing is Private and its director-writer, Alan Ball.

Aaron Eckhart in Alan Ball‘s Nothing Is Private.

I’ve heard more than a few people express similar sentiments over the last two or three days. They don’t dislike this film; they hate it. I feel very differently. I don’t just respect it (as well as the book, “Towelhead,” upon which it’s based); I admire it.

In last Monday’s review I called it “a sturdy, complex character drama that’s 100% deserving of respect…it’s obviously one of the most original, daring films about adolescent sexuality ever delivered by a quasi-mainstreamer…iIt’s also a sharp look at racism (and not just the American-bred kind) and a sobering portrait of the rifts and tensions between American and Middle-Eastern mindsets.”

For whatever reason, the Swedes have decided against calling Jodie Foster‘s Manhattan-vigilante pic The Brave One. Not that I’m a fan of The Stranger Inside, but I’ve never quite figured out what the American title actually means. It doesn’t really work as a literal notion (Foster’s character is “brave” because she works through her fiance’s death and personal trauma by drilling some bad guys?) or an ironic one.

Neil Jordan and Jodie Foster‘s The Brave One (Warner Bros., 9.14) will probably rule the roost this weekend. It’s tracking 74, 39 and 17, which indicates a good $20 million weekend, and maybe a nudge over. Dragon Wars (also opening tomorrow) is at 41, 30 and 9, which means it’ll do less than Jodie & Co..

Billy Bob Thornton‘s Mr. Woodcock (also debuting tomorrow) will do between $10 and $15 million with a 70, 36 and 12. David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises, which is platforming tomorrow and opening wide-ish next weekend, is at 29, 27 and 1.

Good Luck, Chuck (.21) is at 72, 37 and 8. Draw factors include Jessica Alba and that vanilla ice cream cone and Dane Cook, who has a following. The drawback is that Cook strikes some of us as an unrefined Stanley Kowalski type. Did you see him in Mr. Brooks? He’s an animal. His tail swings and you can see steam coming out of his nostrils in the pasture.

Peter Berg‘s The Kingdom opens two weeks from now, and is currently looking at 61, 37 and 6.. It’ll be sneaking this weekend. The Farrelly Brothers’ The Heartbreak Kid, opening 10.5, is looking at 60, 31 and 3, which indicates a good-but-not-spectacular opening. I expect it’ll start upticking before long. Most people don’t get wind of a hit until the very last minute.

Three days late and a dollar short, HE has joined the throng of sites running that on-set JFK look-alike photo from Zack Snyder‘s Watchmen (Warner Bros., 3.6.09), which began filming a few days ago but won’t open for another 18 months. An adaptation of Alan Moore‘s renowned graphic novel series, pic is set in an alternative, neo-Orwellian 1985 in which superhero-ism has been outlawed. Plot focuses on two of them — Billy Crudup‘s “Dr. Manhattan” and Jackie Earl Haley‘s”Rorschach” — uncovering an evil plot to inject lime sherbet into jars of Italian pesto sauce.

A Watchmen site snoop has reported that a flashback scene of Dr. Manhattan meeting President John F. Kennedy on the porch of the White House was filmed the other day….whatever.

Screen Daily‘s Len Klady says he came up with a headline for Patrick Z. McGavin‘s Screen Daily review of Asia Argento‘s Mother of Tears, although it was too long to fit on the page: “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentino.” [Update: apologies for allowing “Asia” to become “Daria” yesterday — TIFF fatigue manifests in strange & unruly forms.]