Mystic River

Years after one of them was abducted and abused, three former friends (Robbins, Penn and Bacon) from the predominantly working class Irish neighbourhood of South Boston find themselves caught up together in an arena of distrust, hatred and betrayal after the murder of Penn's teenage daughter. Though not, apparently, quite as rich a study of community relations as the Dennis Lehane novel on which Brian Helgeland's script is based, the film does largely succeed in its strategy of focusing on character, motivation and milieu rather than on police procedure and straightup action. It is in many ways Eastwood's tightest movie for some time, and certainly his darkest since Unforgiven; indeed, the ending offers as corrosive an assessment of the limits of American justice as anything in his career. The use of the director's own main musical theme is a little heavy-handed, and Linney's Lady Macbeth speech is a touch too explicit to convince, but the sheer classical elegance of Eastwood's direction is a delight.