The second film from auteur James Gray (The Immigrant), The Yards sees his muse, Joaquin Phoenix, feature alongside an all-star cast including Mark Wahlberg (top-billed here), Charlize Theron, James Caan, and Faye Dunaway. The tale of "the yards", a place where contractors fix railway cars for the CTA (City Transit Authority), the film sees rival firms constantly undercutting and sabotaging each others' work, leading to violence and eventually murder. Gray has always been compared to Francis Ford Coppola, and The Yards definitely has a Godfather-esque vibe to it, all be it massively scaled down level. That's of course not to say that the film is comparable to Coppola's epic, but rather that the traits are there, and with his later films (the masterful, overlooked The Immigrant especially) Gray would only go on to further those claims. A visually accomplished film - as are all of the director's features - The Yards is shot in a greyscale colour pallette, which fits perfectly within the film's distinctive milieu.
