Movie

On a show like “The Wire, ” policemen and criminals belong to competitive organizations locked in uneasy, permanent coexistence. In “We Own the Night, ” James Gray’s operatic new film, the police and drug dealers are imagined as warring tribes in a fight to the death. The Russian gangsters on one side appear ready to take out the entire N.Y.P.D. (“We get them all!”) And some of the cops are just as eager to forgo the legal niceties and do some righteous killing of their own (“Wipe ’em out. No survivors.”). In other words, “We Own the Night” is not a procedural, in which the narrative is threaded through details of the job and close observations of big-city life. It is, rather, a bloody, passionate melodrama, self-consciously Shakespearean — or Biblical, or Greek, take your pick of atavisms — in its intentions. — A. O. Scott