“Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”

There’s so much to recommend about Sidney Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” that it seems perverse to pick just one aspect to focus on. So in keeping with perversity, I’ll point to something other than the film’s brutally honest performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, Ethan Hawke and Albert Finney. I’ll mention the drug dealer scenes, which are so unlike drug dealer scenes one usually encounters in movies that they feel like a revelation. Who knew a Modernist, high-rise pod bathed in melancholic afternoon light, Looney Tunes on the TV and a loose kimono on a surly young dude could come together into something that makes you go -- Oh, right, of course.