| Product Summary | | Publisher: Sony Pictures | | Format: DVD | | UPC: 00043396225312 | | Buy.com Sku: 206539972 | | Item#: V2LWGK | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 3947 | | Category Keywords: Crime Violence | Rating:  |
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| | | Two Brothers on Opposite Sides of the Law. Beyond Their Differences Lies Loyalty.
Features: DVD, Widescreen, Aspect Ratio 1.85:1, Dolby Digital (5.1), English, Subtitled, French, Spanish, Dubbed & Subtitled
What if your own family stood in the way of everything you worked for? Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) has forsaken his name to escape his family and their tradition in law enforcement to pursue his ambitions as a Brooklyn nightclub owner. As he turns a blind eye to the drug dealers around him, he comes face to face with the family he abandoned when his brother (Mark Wahlberg) and father (Robert Duvall) crack down on the club. Now Bobby must choose a side. Is he going to turn informant or will he help run the biggest crime ring in New York history?
"An intriguing blend of mainstream audience-pleaser and a more subtle, even intellectual agenda." Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
"The movie really belongs to Phoenix, who gives a haunting performance with just the right degree of intensity." Claudia Puig, USA Today
"It's awfully difficult...to come up with a car chase that's startlingly new, but Gray pulls it off. It's the best of its kind since "The French Connection."" Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor
"...an atmospheric, intense film, well acted, and when it's working it has a real urgency." Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"...an exploration of the demands and obligations of brotherly love, staged with honesty, originality and a surprising spark of intelligence." William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Editor's Note
Director James Gray (THE YARDS) posits two distinctly different brothers--Joseph (Mark Wahlberg) and Bobby Grusinsky (Joaquin Phoenix)--as the central characters in this crime-infested thriller. Joseph and Bobby inhabit two conflicting worlds in late 1980s New York, the former becoming a cop and the latter running a nightclub. Bobby spends his evenings in a den of iniquity, indulging in drugs, alcohol, and gambling, and his model-like girlfriend Amada (Eva Mendes) is never far from his arm. Their two worlds meet when the father of the two men, Burt (Robert Duvall), who is also a cop, gets together with Joseph to ask Bobby for information about a patron of the club named Vadim (Alex Veadov). Vadim is the nephew of the club's owner, and also a dangerous member of the Russian criminal underworld. Bobby sides with Vadim, and the tension in Gray's brother-versus-brother potboiler reaches melting point as Joseph goes after both his sibling and his Russian foe. Wahlberg, Phoenix, and Duvall all deliver high-caliber performances throughout, and Gray suffuses the plot with enough twists and turns to provide a few surprises. New York City is perfectly utilized as a backdrop to the action, and cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay manages to get the balance between moody, atmospheric shots and explosive action sequences just right. WE OWN THE NIGHT ultimately resembles an old-fashioned cop film with a little Scorsese-like drama thrown in for good measure, and is likely to gain a following among movie fans seeking retro crime thrills.
| Features | Audio: English, French, Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound | | Dubbed: French, Spanish | | Interactive Menus | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English, French, Spanish |
| Entertainment Reviews
 | We Own the Night - DVD Review By: Jesse Hassenger - filmcritic.com DVD Reviews Published on: 2/1/2008 8:25 PM | |
James Gray has assembled what looks and sounds like a good, smart thriller with We Own the Night: a strong cast, serious aspirations, a specific time and place (Brooklyn, 1988). The story is shopworn, but not without dramatic potential: Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg play brothers on the opposite-ish sides of the law; Joseph (Wahlberg) has followed in the footsteps of their father (Robert Duvall) and joined the NYPD while Bobby (Phoenix) rebels by running a seedy nightclub. With a drug dealer inching into Bobby's territory, he's forced to reconsider his loyalties. Meanwhile, the movie forces me to reconsider my own, because it spends a lot more time seeming like a good movie than actually being one....read the full review |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Sony Pictures |
| Release Date: 9/23/2008 |
| Running Time: 106 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 2007 | | Catalog ID: 22531 | | UPC: 00043396225312 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English [CC], English, French Dubbed, Spanish Dubbed | | Available Subtitles: English, French, Spanish | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | Widescreen 1.85:1 |
| Cast & Crew
| Awards |
Nominee (2007) | | | Cannes Film Festival, James Gray, Golden Palm Award |
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| | Professional Reviews | Box Office
"[With] some fine performances from Wahlberg and Phoenix....Also effective is Mendes..." 10/01/2007 p.48Rolling Stone
3 stars out of 4 -- "WE OWN THE NIGHT is defiantly, refreshingly unhip....You're in the presence of a born filmmaker." 10/18/2007 p.132 Total Film
3 stars out of 5 -- "WE OWN THE NIGHT emerges as a solid, professional job with a keenly observed sense of time and place..." 01/01/2008 p.54 Sight and Sound
"Phoenix's performance is magnetic here....The film's velvety matte look -- attractively shot by Joaquin Baca-Asay -- proves slinkily seductive." 01/01/2008 p.90 Uncut
4 stars out of 5 -- "Three superbly orchestrated shoot-outs are up there with the best of the genre..." 01/01/2008 p.127 Reel.com 8 of 10
If the crime melodrama We Own the Night was made and released in the 1970s, the era whose moody, director-driven movies it most resembles, the film might have seemed more accomplished than it does now. While a classic, Godfather-esque vibe informs writer/director James Gray's evocative portrait of family loyalty, law enforcement, and New York mobsters (in this case, Russian ones), there's also a deja vu feeling to the whole enterprise. This isn't helped by the fact that Gray visited similar territory in his previous films Little Odessa and The Yards. But taken on its own terms, We Own the Night has much to recommend, as long as you don't focus too much on its various plotholes and inconsistencies, or the hunch that you've been down these mean streets many times before...Phoenix and Wahlberg (who also co-starred in Gray's The Yards) are believable and committed as the estranged brothers who eventually find common ground, though it's neither of their most memorable work. Duvall is excellent, as always, as the guys' tough, but fair widower dad, even if he's a bit too old now for the part...We Own the Night may not feel any more special than watching a rerun of The Sopranos or The Wire, but as a serious adult crime yarn, you could do far worse. - Gary Goldstein
ReelViews 8 of 10
Loyalty. Betrayal. Violence. Family. Those are the crucial staples to be found in any crime drama worth viewing, and writer/director James Gray shoehorns them into his high wattage effort, We Own the Night. Despite a plot that occasionally creaks and groans under the weight of a few too many coincidences and contrivances, We Own the Night offers effective drama and enough suspense to ensure that audiences will stay put until the end credits roll. And, even though Joaquin Phoenix gives a less-than-stellar performance in the lead role, we're still interested to know where the character arc will take this ambiguous individual...With a cast like this, one has a right to expect something amazing, so the fact that We Own the Night is merely "entertaining" might cause disappointment in some quarters. As cop/crime dramas go, this one offers little that's new but it takes the time to develop the characters and that's where its strengths lie. Remove this aspect, and all that would remain is a generic story about a mini-war between Russian mobsters and New York City cops, circa 1988. Credit Gray for at least giving us more meat than that to chew on. - James Berardinelli
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