Interesting attempt by the eighty-three-year-old Sidney Lumet to keep up with the Tarantinos, piloting a caper film of back-and-forth time jumps and alternating points of view. The caper itself, a jewelry store stickup, is strictly small-time. "We don't want Tiffany's," the mastermind, a drug-dependent real estate accountant (Philip Seymour Hoffman), pitches the idea to his younger brother, a deadbeat dad (Ethan Hawke): "We want a mom-and-pop operation." More specifically, the operation of their own mom and pop (Rosemary Harris and Albert Finney), squeezed between Claire's and Foot Locker in a cookie-cutter Westchester shopping mall. The robbery goes very wrong very early, and the ensuing time scramble dispenses information and revelations on an unpredictable schedule. We meet "Grandma," for example, at a school play after we have seen her shot in the holdup and before we find out she was not supposed to be at work that day. And we find out that the recruited younger brother is having an affair with his sister-in-law, the mastermind's wife (Marisa Tomei, more extensively attractive than ever), before we even know that the mastermind has any part in the plan. The totally botched robbery, leaving no prospect of success and profit, quickly eliminates much of the standard suspense in this sort of thing (cueing instead a brooding Fargo-esque musical score from Fargo's actual composer, Carter Burwell), and it permits the focus to shift to the deeply jaundiced view of family life -- family discord, family disloyalty, family dysfunction. That view, while it lets in a fair share of malicious humor, is not to be taken lightly. Lumet, whose long list of credits runs along the lines of Twelve Angry Men, Long Day's Journey into Night, Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Verdict, and the like, is by nature banished from lightness. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd