Cannes. We Own the Night.

"The carefully orchestrated alternations between reflectiveness and rage that made [James Gray's] prior film, The Yards, so compelling, here give way to hackneyed and predictable melodrama and a ham-fisted tendency to tell rather than show, capped off by two final lines of dialogue that, if I read my colleagues correctly, really tipped the scales in favor of hooting the thing off the screen," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

"Not so long ago, it looked like James Gray's career as a film director might be over," wrote Patrick Goldstein last week in a backgrounder for the Los Angeles Times. "His 2000 movie, The Yards, a drama with a cast of budding young talent - Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron - had just bombed at the box office.... What a difference seven years makes. Gray has finally emerged with a new film that could earn both critical plaudits and win the 38-year-old director a larger audience. Called We Own the Night [and in Competition], the movie is a gripping drama set in the 1980s at the height of a bloody war between New York police and Russian mobsters who have targeted the officers and their families. The film stars Phoenix and Wahlberg as brothers in conflict."

"Outbidding several companies that specialize in independent films, Sony's Columbia Pictures has plunked down a hefty $11.5 million for North American rights," John Horn reported in the LAT on Monday.

Tatiana Siegel talks with Gray for the Hollywood Reporter.

Updates, 5/26: "The set-up is great," blogs Anne Thompson. "But the story goes wrong, somehow, in the second half, despite a terrific rain-drenched car chase. It may come down to one thing: we like Phoenix so much as a rebellious party boy who isn't a cop, that we don't buy him wanting to become one. The sellers did the right thing showing the film to buyers only before the press got to it."

"Gray and cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay capture the gritty nights of 80s New York, and even the daytime scenes have a film of grime over them; there's some excellent camera work in the film, ranging from a hair's breadth escape Bobby makes in the desperate heat of the moment to a car chase action sequence set in a summertime downpour; the film looks coherent, cohesive, distinctive," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi. "The story doesn't feel that way, though - We Own the Night seems a little torn: Is it a family drama or an action film, a showcase for performances or a knuckle-clenching exercise in tension?"

Matt Dentler meets Robert Duvall; this isn't the interview, by the way, but the story behind the interview.

"It's good to see Gray back on his feet after years in movie jail... but this is too often a crude, unsubtle, difficult-to-digest film," writes Jeffrey Wells.

Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab: "This film is clunky but it's also very heartfelt. Feels throwbacky in a mostly good way."

"While James Gray's murky cop drama perhaps didn't belong in competition at the Cannes Film Festival - it's a solid, if unremarkable piece of storytelling - it certainly didn't deserve the chorus of boos and catcalls which drowned out the closing credits at its first press screening," writes Wendy Ide for the London Times. "What lifts the film and lights it like a beacon is Phoenix's superb central performance."

"The main complaints have been about the predictability of the plot, but Gray is plainly aiming for the emotional intensity and grand inevitability of Greek tragedy," writes Dennis Lim for IFC News. "Grave, earnest, not especially interested in humor or irony, he may not be a fashionable filmmaker, as the critical response has confirmed. In fact, he's something of an anachronism; at his best, though, he's also one of the few true classicists working in American movies."

Update, 6/2: The Toronto Star's Peter Howell listens in as James Gray and Robert Duvall, director and one of the stars of We Own the Night, butt heads over Bonnie and Clyde:

Gray: "You don't like Bonnie and Clyde? You're wrong."

Duvall: "No, you're wrong. The acting was so overstated. C'mon. The acting sucked, Jimmy! You know that!"

Gray: "I don't know. I loved that movie. I'm sorry."

Duvall: "Arthur Penn. A guy from New York doing something rural!"

Gray: "The movie doesn't play like a realistic thing. It's a whole other thing."

Duvall: "See if it holds up, Jimmy! See if it holds up!"

Via Movie City News.

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Cannes @ 60. Index.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 25, 2007 5:24 AM