Here's a little quiz. Name two provocative movies over the past two years, both by a famous director, that have gone largely unseen? If anyone has suggested a movie involving Adam Sandler in any fashion you are hereby immediately condemned to hell where you will be forced to watch reruns of "Three's Company" for the rest of eternity.

The correct answer, at least from my view, is last year's "Find Me Guilty" and this year's "Before the Devil Knows Your Dead", both by the renowned Sidney Lumet.

Both movies are the obvious work of a master craftsman, and fit in extraordinarily well with a library of works that include "Twelve Angry Men", "The Pawnbroker", "Serpico", "Dog Day Afternoon", "Network", "The Verdict" and "Running on Empty", all made between 1957 and 1988. Few directors have remained this relevant for this long.

In "Find Me Guilty" Lumet does the near impossible, namely coaxing a genuinely moving dramatic performance out of Vin Diesel. Based on a true story, Diesel plays a low-level mob figure who is indicted in a massive criminal conspiracy case. He subsequently becomes a participant in the longest running mob trial in the history of the State of New Jersey.

Diesel is shockingly good as a lightweight buffoon who fires his lawyer and assumes his own legal defense. With the advice and assistance of a lawyer (Peter Dinklage) representing a co-defendant, he proceeds to take over the courtroom with an astonishing combination of wit, charm and street sense.

In the hands of a lesser director, "Find Me Guilty" could have easily devolved into caricature and lightweight parody. However, Lumett never loses the authenticity of an actual trial. This includes spot-on performances by Ron Silver as the beleaguered Judge fighting to maintain control of his courtroom and Linus Roache as a prosecutor who gradually becomes the victim of his own political ego.

Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows Your Dead" is a modern day film noir. It is a story that involves children robbing their parents, parents' killing their own children, siblings having affairs with their siblings' wives, drug use, embezzlement and other uplifting topics. Yet despite its depressing tone, it is, like most great film noirs, fascinating to watch.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play two down and out brothers who plan to rob their parents' jewelry store. Things go incredibly wrong when Hawke's accomplice bungles the robbery, resulting in his death and the fatal shooting of Hawke and Hoffman's mother.

Lumet handles the subsequent emotional devastation and trauma in the manner reflected by Pacino's angry robber in "Dog Day Afternoon" and Peter Finch's meltdown in "The Network." Albert Finney is wonderful as the grief stricken father who is trying to make sense over his wife's death. Additionally, the underrated Marisa Tomei brings a sense of desperate passion to her role as the disaffected spouse of Hoffman and the clandestine lover of Hawke.

Trapped in a crime that has resulted in their mother's death, Hoffman and Hawke begin their own emotional death spiral. Forced to console their father throughout the funeral process while hiding their own guilt, they are simultaneously hounded by blackmail demands of the wife of Hawke's dead accomplice and Hoffman's employer's discovery of his embezzlement to support his heroin addiction. Let me simply say that this is not a movie to be seen by any person susceptible to attacks of depression during the holiday season.

However, unlike the praised "Leaving Las Vegas" (1995), praise that I still think was unjustified, Lumet's genius lies in the fact that you care about these characters even though they are completely unsympathetic. While I found myself simply wishing that Nicholas Cage would hurry up and drink himself to death in "Leaving Las Vegas" so that I could leave the theater, one cannot help but be emotionally caught up in these characters' series of tragic misadventures.

As Hoffman told Hawke when they first agreed to rob their parents' store, "There was no going back." Clearly that was the theme of this movie. Two losers decide to break the law for a quick score, and their lives unravel in a blinding series of robberies, blackmail and murders.

Lumet seems to be reminding the audience that there is a thin line separating civilized behavior from outright barbarianism. Destroy that line and you begin a poisonous free fall down Alice's rabbit hole. Like Dorian Grey's picture, the end result is your own rapid moral decay.