We Own the Night (15)Youth Without Youth (15)

Two films this week invite comparison with the young Francis Ford Coppola never a wise thing for a film-maker to do if it can possibly be avoided. Of the two, the one that comes off better from the comparison is undoubtedly James Gray's We Own the Night. Like his earlier The Yards, this is a sombre, intelligent, feeling crime drama set in a working-class New York characterised by striving and shabbiness; and like The Yards it stars the faintly unlikely pairing of Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg.

The film opens in Brooklyn 1988, or at any rate that's what the caption says, though the soundtrack places things 10 years earlier a hint that we're some way off the main drag here. Phoenix plays Bobby Green, manager of a successful night-club a hedonist, we gather, from his opening clinch with his beautiful girlfriend, Amada (Eva Mendes), but a hedonist with ambition and ideas. His boss, a kindly old Russian, is willing to back them up: pretty soon, Bobby's going to be moving to Manhattan to open a new club.

Cut from the heaving dance-floor to a quieter, drabber party in a Catholic church, where a bunch of cops and their families have gathered to honour the newly promoted Joe Grusinsky (Wahlberg). Joe comes from a family of hard-working, decent cops; his father, Bert (Robert Duvall whose face, even after dozens of Days of Glory-style clunkers, remains one of the most reassuring sights on screen), is a deputy chief of police. And Bobby, it turns out, is Joe's brother, the family's black sheep.

Now, Joe is in charge of a drive to bring down the new, more vicious drug-dealers who have come over from Russia and are killing policemen "like flies", and he thinks his brother's connections could be the key. Bobby takes the request as an insult, to add to whatever injuries his family has done him before. But then Joe is shot and nearly killed outside his house, and a dealer who also wants Bobby's connections brags that Bert is next on the list; and Bobby realises that loyalty to your family overrides other kinds of loyalty.

In the way it uses crime as the backdrop to a family story, We Own the Night is recognisably a descendant of The Godfather; and you might trace stylistic resemblances in, for instance, the murky palette Gray employs of browns and tarnished gold. It contains sequences of which the young Coppola might have been proud: when Bobby is conducted to a drug den, to check the product before signing up to the supply chain, the cranking up of the tension, through subtly discordant sound and uneasy editing, is irresistible; the den itself, with its whisper of white powder, is a remarkable creation, not quite of this world.

And then there is the car chase, though the word "chase" suggests a sense of direction that Gray is at pains to avoid. Like Paul Greengrass, in the last two Bourne movies, Gray takes the view that knowing what is going on would only spoil the excitement, but where Greengrass likes engine noise and a wildly shaking camera, Gray opts for the swish of windscreen wipers and a pounding rain that washes away background and distance.

I think, too, that Phoenix here doesn't fall far short of the young Al Pacino; he's put on a few pounds, so that he looks like someone who doesn't much bother to resist temptation, while also gaining a new heft. Duvall, too, is excellent as the kind of father you wouldn't want to disappoint; Wahlberg does disappoint, though, having seemingly decided that virtue works like a wet blanket, dousing energy and expressiveness.

Where Gray falls short of Coppola is in his excessive devotion to the notion of family, and a shallow notion at that. In The Godfather, there is never any question but that the family can be a trap; when Michael Corleone, the son who doesn't want to be a mafioso, returns to the fold he is clearly giving up integrity, happiness and much else.

Still, that family does include sisters and mothers as well as brothers and sons. In We Own the Night, women are frighteningly rare. To begin with, Mendes' character is promising, as she and Bobby talk about ambitions for marriage, a big house, lots of kids an intriguing hint that their unrespectable world is, under the surface glitter, no different from Joe and Bert's respectable one. But later, she is reduced to a nagging pain, her big mouth threatening Bobby's security when he's in hiding from the Russians; the only thing we really know about Bobby and Joe's mother is that Bobby borrowed her maiden name, Green. And family is taken as the be-all and end-all: so that the denouement has the brothers declaring how much they love one another an outbreak of blunt sentimentality that left me aggrieved and slightly nauseous.

The other big problem is that Gray lacks any sense of how to vary tone or pace: there are no lighter moments here, no moments of relaxation after the climax, just one damn thing after another. But with all those qualifications, the film has weight, ambition and style; and those get you through.

Youth Without Youth is also haunted by the young Coppola, but in a far more dismal way: for this is Coppola's first feature in 10 years, and it is a disaster. The story is taken from a novel by Mircea Eliade, the Romanian philosopher of myth and religion. It opens in 1938: Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) is an ageing scholar who has sacrificed all personal happiness to his quest for the key to human language and thought (a resemblance to Casaubon in Middlemarch, searching for the key to all mythologies, may not be coincidental). One day he is struck by lightning, and miraculously regains his youth, along with a superhumanly prodigious memory and some ill-defined paranormal powers.

He pursues his investigations through wartime Europe, resisting the machinations of Nazi scientists eager to find the secret of eternal youth; post-war, he meets the reincarnation of his long-lost love who, also struck by lightning, begins to speak in ancient tongues, offering him the prospect of the fulfilment of his quest.

What made Coppola think this would make for a good film? It could almost have been designed as an exercise to demonstrate the different kinds of fantasy that literature and cinema can bear. Even taking the intractability of the material into account, it is startlingly amateurish. The philosophy is trite, and fatuously expounded (it's as if Coppola, looking back, had pinpointed the long monologue by Marlon Brando at the end of Apocalypse Now as the best thing he'd ever done, and tried to recapture the spirit). The script rushes through incidents without ever acquiring impetus; the acting is uneven, and involves an inexplicable Euro-pudding of accents; Roth's old-man make-up is up there with Kate Winslet's old lady in Titanic; and the editing by that master Walter Murch, who did Apocalypse Now is at times even slapdash.

Youth without Youth is a terrible postscript to a once-brilliant career; I urge you to avoid it, and preserve a few illusions.