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Such a frustrating disappointment

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Blistering performances.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

You wouldn't have thought that a movie with Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Robert Duvall and even Eva Mendes could actually produce such impassioned and wooden performances. But the writing and the plot are just so bad I can forgive them for never rising to any level even approximating competence. In order to revive themselves they resort to pantomime-like (couldn't use a real word because this review doesn't have a decent dictionary) over-acting but then as Gray wrote and directed this stiff melodrama, again forgiveness for the actors. Thank god I didn't pay money for this. I felt ripped off even investing 2 hours of my time in this clichéd nothingness. And now I have to blah the rest of this to fill out the stupid ten line minimum when I could have reviewed (there's that inadequate IMDb dictionary making me change a perfectly complete word again) it in two damn words... "It's bad", or even just one... "BAD"

It's 1988 Brooklyn. Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) runs a lavish nightclub El Caribe and is in business with questionable characters. Joe Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg) follow his father Burt (Robert Duvall) into the family business policeman. Bobby is actually his brother using his mother's maiden name. Only his girlfriend Amada Juarez (Eva Mendes) knows his secret. Joe and Burt ask him to help spy on the Russians for narcotics but he refuses. After they raid Bobby's club, Joe gets shot. It gets more and more dangerous as things spiral out of control.This is an amazing cast and they all do a good job. This should be great but it's merely good enough. It has a gritty feel but somehow not realistic. Something is missing that I have to put down to writer/director James Gray. It has more the feel of the 70s like an older Godfather movie especially with the music selection. It may be the yellow tint on everything or the washed out colors. It throws me off with the realism of the movie. Even the subtitles reminds me of The Godfather. It's suppose to be late 80s and I don't get that sense. Joaquin does his usual great work. Mark Wahlberg matches him. This should have been such a great movie.

This film drags. After a few fits and starts when you hope if finally gets going, another dull, irrelevant scene that could have been left on the cutting room floor sucks you back down. Donny Wahlberg barely gets a supporting role. Joaquin shines enough you want to suffer to see it through. But the way the action goes down is SOOO unlikely, you wonder who the heck was advising the writers and director. They've obviously never worked a club or scored on a connect. And by the end, all the characters just fall flat.The first scene is the bomb. You can catch that on Youtube and save the next two hours for something worthy.

This is a review of "Little Odessa", "The Yards" and "We Own the Night", three crime dramas by director James Gray.Released in 1994, "Little Odessa" stars Tim Roth as Joshua Shapira, a volatile criminal who has been exiled by his family. A "prodigal son returns" narrative, the film watches as Roth returns to his family home. Though his relatives still distrust him, Joshua is idolised by his younger brother, little Reuben Shapira (Edward Furlong). The film ends, as most "prodigal son" tales do, with Reuben dying, paying for his brother's sins."Little Odessa" was Gray's debut. It's a very good drama, well acted by the always electric Tim Roth, but the film's ethnic details are unconvincing and Gray falters in his final act with an obvious, overblown sequence in which little Reuben is accidentally gunned down.Gray followed "Odessa" up with "The Yards" (2000), a crime drama set in the commuter rail yards of New York City. The film's structure is similar to "Odessa", and sees Mark Wahlberg playing an ex-convict who returns home after a short stint in prison. Wahlberg attempts to stay clean, to keep his nose out of crime, but is drawn back into the criminal underworld by a friend played by Joaquin Phoenix. The film retains the "brotherhood dynamics" of "Odessa", Wahlberg playing the "good son" who eventually turns on his suffocating sibling. Once again the film ends with a ridiculously over-the-top death sequence.While "The Yards" has a certain, smothering pretentiousness about it, convinced about its own importance (it's lit like Rembrandt, street fights are filmed like Visconti's "Rocco and His Brothers" and it's reaching for the tone of Coppola's "The Godfather"), Gray nevertheless cooks up some wonderful strokes, like a beautifully sensitive welcome-home party, a wordless assassination attempt and a fine, aching performance by Wahlberg. It's a great mixed bag.Gray then directed "We Own The Night", arguably his best crime flick. The "good brother/bad brother" motif returns, this time with Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix playing a pair of brothers on either side of the law. Phoenix's a perpetually high playboy who owns a nightclub frequented by drug-runners and mafia types, and Wahlberg's a straight-arrow cop trying to keep the streets clean. When the mafia unleashes an assassination campaign on local cops, Phoenix switches allegiances, goes undercover and attempts to take down the mob. There are touches of "Donnie Brasco", "Rush", "Point Break", "Serpico", "State of Grace", "Infernal Affairs" and every other "undercover cop" movie you can think of, but the film is beautifully lit, is atypically straight-faced and features a superb, rain-soaked car chase.Some have suggested that Gray's trilogy should be celebrated for working in a "classical", almost conventionally Greek mould. That his conventionality suggests that all his characters are at the mercy of already in place contours, their fates forgone. Mostly, though, Gray's trilogy highlights the ways in which contemporary artists have struggled to conceive of a response to postmodernism. The crime movies of, say, Tarantino and Scorsese, are unashamedly postmodern, toying with and regurgitating clichés from 1930s Warner machine gun operas and MGM crime flicks. They aren't about "crime", so much as they're pastiche jobs, jazzed up films about crime films. As a response to this aesthetic, artists who deem themselves "serious", who rightfully ask "what exactly comes next?", tend to look backwards at what came before, as though post-war modernism, by virtue of being modernism, is intrinsically "the solution". This leads to classically shot and written but wholly regressive fare like Gray's trilogy, which essentially unscrambles the world's Scorseses and Tarantinos and puts you right back in the 1940s, minus the irony and flippancy.But you can't go backwards in this way; your audience will always be ten steps ahead and there will always be a huge chasm between your solemnity and the tired insights your film delivers. This is why true progressive works in the genre, for example fare like "The Wire", which actively attempts a cognitive mapping of both global capitalism and crime, are neither modernist or postmodern, whilst possessing the vital traits of both. Philosophers have alternatively coined this new movement "neoprimitivism", "pseudomodernism", "participatism", "post-post modernism", but the one that seems to be sticking is "new modernism".Whatever you call it, this hypothetical movement rejects postmodern nihilism (nothing matters, there is no "truth", it's just a film), actively tries to convey the complexities of our world, and covertly believes that it is possible and necessary for individuals to make value judgements, take stands, approach objectivity, and back facts up. It is modernist in its desires to "understand", "teach", "decipher" and "make better" the world, and in its emphasis on culture, society, technology and politics. The movement doesn't reject postmodernism, but co-opts its tropes and bends them to suit its aim, questioning agency, subjectivity and attempting to piece together the fragments and multiple perspectives that typify complex systems. In short, truly relevant crime films simultaneously simulate our contemporary environment of junk, noise, commerce and static, before proceeding to decode, organise and target roots. As William Gibson said way back in the 1980s, future great artist will function like search engines, mapping and making sense of the detritus. Gray goes backwards to when there was less noise.7.9/10 - Worth one viewing.