We Own the Night

Two brothers on opposite sides in Brooklyn in 1988: Bobby runs a nightclub and Joseph is a policeman. Their father is a deputy chief in the NYPD. When an operation against Russian drug dealers leaves the father fatally shot, Bobby gives up the club and puts on a uniform. James Gray's film is about choosing between family and duty, and it moves in his usual register: heavy, dark and classically built. The most discussed sequence is the car chase in the rain. The camera stays almost entirely inside the car, so the outside is wipers and water, and gunfire arrives without a visible source. It is one of the rare chases staged from the driver's field of vision rather than the audience's. Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg and Robert Duvall lead. It competed at Cannes in 2007. Reviews split, with Rotten Tomatoes at 57 percent and a consensus calling the characters bland and the dialogue clichéd, while Roger Ebert called it an atmospheric, intense, well-acted film. CinemaScore audiences gave it a B minus. Against a budget between 21 and 28 million dollars it grossed 55.3 million worldwide, opening third with 10.8 million across 2,362 theatres. Who it is for: viewers who like a seventies crime register and family tragedy. Who it is not for: anyone wanting an original script. The story is familiar and the strength is in the filmmaking.