Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

USA, 117 minutes
Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Kelly Masterson
Photography: Ron Fortunato
Music: Carter Burwell
Editor: Tom Swartwout
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Rosemary Harris, Michael Shannon, Bryan F. O'Byrne, Amy Ryan, Aleksa Palladino, Leonardo Cimino, Blaine Horton

Director Sidney Lumet's last picture came more than 50 years after his first, and it's a decent clinic in all the things he was good at. We learn by way of DVD extras, for example, that Lumet was at pains to describe Before the Devil Knows You're Dead as a melodrama rather than a thriller. With the caper crime at the center of it I've always been inclined to think of it more as a thriller, but he makes a good argument. One change he made to the original screenplay was to make Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) brothers rather than friends. It's simple, but amps up the tension between them, notably over the ongoing affair Hank is having with Andy's wife Gina (Marisa Tomei)—amps it up by approximately an infinite degree. Where it might have been just sad and pathetic, it now has more potential for convulsive epic tragedy.

In fact, this is a tremendously agonizing story, maybe even unbelievable in synopsis, but pulled off by the skill of Lumet and his cast and crew. I was reminded a little of Dancer in the Dark, which I was talking about a few weeks ago as hurtling vertiginously into darkness. The same arc is at play here, but whereas Dancer director Lars von Trier insists on distancing himself from the emotional wallop, Lumet rushes in fully embracing exactly that, shading everything he can think of to make it as fraught as possible. On the DVD commentary track, Hoffman points out a close-up of a finger squeezing a trigger and says that's when he knew he was working on a melodrama.

12 Angry Men (1957)

USA, 96 minutes
Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Reginald Rose
Photography: Boris Kaufman
Music: Kenyon Hopkins
Editor: Carl Lerner
Cast: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Warden, Ed Begley, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Jack Klugman, George Voskovec, Robert Webber, Edward Binns, Joseph Sweeney

12 Angry Men may be director Sidney Lumet's first feature film, but it draws on many years of experience in the early days of broadcast television, taking on the self-serious grain of message pictures and the confined space of a soundstage to the point where it's almost dreary. Reginald Rose's screenplay is based on his own stage play about a jury deliberation that proceeds much in the format of an Agatha Christie "10 little Indians" tale. We only learn about the murder case they are deliberating by way of their own sparring analysis and debate. On their first ballot, early in the movie, when they finally sit down to start hashing out a verdict, the tally is 11 to one for conviction. It's the hottest day of the year, a thunderstorm is brewing up just outside the windows, and they have to make a decision.

Rose's story is fairly pat—you come to understand quickly that the drift here is changing "guilty" votes to "not guilty" votes, one by one. There are many convenient plot points along the way but nothing egregious. It feels, still, vividly evocative of its time (which is not to say dated by any means), addressing most directly issues of prejudice and bigotry there at the early years of the modern civil rights movement. We get one look at the defendant in the establishing shots early. He is a young man of color, but after that it is perfectly ambiguous. He could be Arabic, Mexican, Italian, Greek, or many other ethnic strains or combinations. But more than that, more than anything, 12 Angry Men comes across as a nearly full-throated affirmation of the American system of justice, albeit leaving room for concerns about it from many different directions.

Network (1976)

USA, 121 minutes
Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Paddy Chayevsky
Photography: Owen Roizman
Music: Elliott Lawrence
Editor: Alan Heim
Cast: Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, Ned Beatty, Beatrice Straight, Wesley Addy, Kathy Cronkite, Lee Richardson, Arthur Burghardt

Network is one of those movies with a not undeserved reputation for getting things right, large and small. But first and more than anything it is an acting showcase, cast almost perfectly, built around stellar performances (at least six by my count), realized via Sidney Lumet, a director deeply simpatico with the art. Then it lucked into one of those defining iconic things, which defined it, ultimately outgrew and overshadowed it in many ways, in the catch phrase, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore," writer Paddy Chayevsky's nearly perfect mantra of learned helplessness, resonating more than ever today. I'm willing to bet it's a feeling familiar to anyone reading this. The reverberation of that sense is one of the great surprises and enduring pleasures of this picture.

Full disclosure: I didn't much like Network at the time of its release. I thought it was too broad and obvious, and was put off by the highfalutin corporate vocabulary, even more by what I perceived as satire that was simply too easy. I didn't believe it. But seeing it decades later brought a shock of recognition, in its pitch-perfect sense of corporate environment and notably in its anticipation of those tabloid talk shows we got from Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer, all stocked with armies of raging plain folks and the depressing sense their motivations were just shallow, or incoherent—and certainly manipulated. Or, as Yeats described the situation some time ago, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."