We Own the Night (2007)

Booed at the Cannes film festival (always a sign that a movie has good energy), James Gray's pulverizing crime drama is unafraid to put its passions right out where it's easy to mock them. We Own the Night is defiantly, refreshingly unhip. Set in Brooklyn in the late 1980s, the film proudly wears its heart on its sleeve. Joaquin Phoenix is electrifying and then some as club manager Bobby Green (changed from Grusinsky), a drug-happy party boy with a sizzling Puerto Rican girlfriend, Amada (Eva…

Booed at the Cannes film festival (always a sign that a movie has good energy), James Gray's pulverizing crime drama is unafraid to put its passions right out where it's easy to mock them. We Own the Night is defiantly, refreshingly unhip. Set in Brooklyn in the late 1980s, the film proudly wears its heart on its sleeve. Joaquin Phoenix is electrifying and then some as club manager Bobby Green (changed from Grusinsky), a drug-happy party boy with a sizzling Puerto Rican girlfriend, Amada (Eva…

Flanked thematically by last year's Best Picture winner (The Departed) and maybe this year's (American Gangster), We Own the Night would be small-fry even if it wasn't just a decent cops-and-the-city drama.

Story

It's 1988 Brooklyn, and the rampant underground violence is about to come to the surface and strike one family especially hard: the Grusinskys. We Own the Night opens with a shot of the black-sheep Grusinsky, Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix)who has changed his last name to Green to hide his…