Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead Photo: ThinkFilm Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: The Academy Awards are Sunday, so we’re looking back on times when an actor was nominated for the wrong film—and on the performance they should have been nominated for that same year. Advertisement Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) There’s no way Philip Seymour Hoffman can control the vein in his forehead, right? In Sidney Lumet’s pitch-black swan song Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, the actor seems to wield the crease bulging across his face as an emotional tool every bit as expressive as the brows, eyes, or mouth. For the morally dissipated white-collar crook Andy Hanson, this feature comes to resemble a tube clogged with rage that he can only let out in abrupt jags of verbal abuse, directed for the most part toward his younger brother, Hank (Ethan Hawke). Years of barely suppressed anger have hardened and narrowed his vein as effectively as any cholesterol, so that the feelings passing through it can only be released under a terrible and violent duress hinting at how deep his many resentments run. That goes for the sibling he bullies, but also the father (Albert Finney) with whom he is so bitterly estranged that he suspects they might not be related, and the wife (Marisa Tomei) he treats like a non-presence in their home.