The Yards: Critic Reviews

A slice of NYC made with imitation cheese.

A serious film that strives for a moral complexity and a textural density rarely found in contemporary dramas.

A great director's losing battle against a goofy script.

A haunting experience.

By the end, we're left with a feeling of depletion rather than resolution.

I can't remember when a film so well-acted and so well-rendered visually was also so oppressive to sit through.

An On the Waterfront wannabe, directed with a heavy portentousness that smothers the drama in a thick sauce of self-importance.

It is so choked with its own solemnity that it barely musters the energy to tell a story.

Things in The Yards become so hard to swallow that even the most easygoing movie-goers will find it hard to suspend disbelief.

More preoccupied with themes and moods than providing anything intriguing plot-wise or character-wise for the viewer to truly care about.

How "The Yards" shifts toward crime drama through character rather than pure plot is hard to disclose without divesting twists. Inspired by real-life scandal, James Gray lets personal insight color Shakespearean shenanigans of privilege, panic and power.

Sem medo de evocar comparacoes com "O Poderoso Chefao", Gray cria um filme repleto de personagens ambiguos e uma forte atmosfera de tristeza e desesperanca moral.

...the filmmaker's use of dark visuals effectively matches the moody, almost operatic tone of the script.

Understatement is something that one would not normally associate with such a pulpy tale, but that's what makes Gray's film surprisingly effective.

Writer/director James Gray tells the story with an impressive urban palate.

A sensitive, intelligent and ambitious variation on the traditional going-straight story.

Lacks the pizzazz of energetic pulp, but doesn't replace it with any compensatory insight or power.

A very good film, and though obviously flawed, it does generate one form of elation: the feeling of seeing a young director stick to the guns of his tricky, ambitious material, and find the right people to tell his story.

Self-consciously elegiac, The Yards is a slow-burning but meticulously crafted family melodrama posing as a thriller.

Atmospheric, worthy-but dull crime drama, with a largely wasted cast of greats.

This is a story with Shakespeare-league themes -- greed, betrayal, graft, corruption. It's too much to expect Shakespeare-level dialogue, and we don't get it. But what we do get is pretty darned good.

Though The Yards starts with a familiar crime plot, it becomes fascinating because of its characters.

Despite Gray's insistence on lighting everything as if this were Don Corleone in a drawing room, The Yards remains a vacant lot.

A well-presented but grim drama that unravels about halfway through...

The true star of the film was the cinematography.