Rating: 
Summary: we bury our sins. we wash them clean.
Review: Based on the Dennis Lehane novel of the same name, Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" is the story of three men who live in the suburbs of Boston: convenience store owner Jimmy Markum (played by Sean Penn), Massachusetts State police officer Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon), and Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins), who goes through unsteady periods of employment. As childhood friends, the three men become reunited when Jimmy's daughter is found brutally murdered one day. While the police continue to investigate, the men rediscover the nightmarish events of a traumatic childhood calamity, and their families soon become aware of the boiling emotions that have begun to arise.
During the first ten minutes of this film, I did not know how much I was going to end up liking it. I felt that the plot wasn't going anywhere, and that there were a lot of scenes that didn't seem to be relevant. However, I soon came to discover how much Eastwood took his time to make this film more than just a murder mystery. "Mystic River" is a quietly gripping thriller that keeps its viewers guessing, but it is also an evocative and somewhat disturbing look at the way people's lives were affected by one tragic incident. Although it is a rather quiet film by most standards, it is no less suspenseful and intriguing than some of this summer's action blockbusters. As the film progresses, the viewer slowly follows the policemen in their search for the answer to the whodunit, and no key elements beyond their knowledge are ever revealed before they discover them. This is already a high point for me, since I can't even start to count all the thrillers I've seen where I knew the answer before the police did. But while on one hand the film gives the viewer a smoothly unraveling mystery, it also presents several scenes in which a character gives a lengthy soliloquy to express the turmoil his life. Before long, the viewer is brought to nearly the same degree of anguish as the character, and then the film promptly picks up where it left off on the mystery plot. Some scenes and lines may not seem necessary at first, but by the film's end they will help to explain the complex lives of the men and their families. The film also profits from what may be some of the best performances of the year. Penn is simply stunning as a grieving father who is hell-bent on vengeance, and Oscar-Winner Marcia Gay Harden will more than likely get another nomination for her performance as Dave's wife. Tim Robbins is also superb with a much more difficult role as a sad, confused man, and Bacon is also convincing as a cop with an estranged wife. In fact, Bacon, Robbins, Lawrence Fishburne (as Bacon's partner), Kevin Chapman, and Adam Nelson (as the "Savage Brothers") could very well occupy the entire Best Supporting Actor category this year! However, "Mystic River" is not a film everyone will enjoy'it took me a few days of retrospect for me to enjoy it as much as I do now'and the denouement is not without a few odd glitches. Having not read the novel, I can't say whether Eastwood remained faithful to the original source material, but the actions of some characters just didn't seem to ring true in the end. Other minor plot elements seemed a little coincidental, and the film's music is too loud and overbearing when used in some tense scenes. But with sterling performances and a deep, symbolic plotline that transcends most other dramas this year, "Mystic River" is an intelligent film that clearly shows a lot of good work in filmmaking. While it is not perfect, and maybe too slow or long for some viewers, it is more than good enough to qualify as one of the better films of the year so far. See it if it interests you in any way.
Rating: 
Summary: Good acting, interesting story. But I wish I'd liked it more
Review: Now, if you're going for a thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat or if you're seeking a mystery that's plot-driven and all about the clues, then MYSTIC RIVER is definitely not going to satisfy you. I went to see it because the cast that director Clint Eastwood assembled is incredible, and the story is motivated by character-rooted actions and decisions. Still, I was underwhelmed by MYSTIC RIVER. Sean Penn is absolutely brilliant playing a neighborhood ex-con who becomes a successful businessman, yet he cannot escape his past when his daughter is brutally murdered. It's a role that seems like the sort of part Penn has played well before, yet there are layers to his character that are fascinating to watch. Still, at the same time, his character Jimmy never really surprised me with any of his actions. I saw where the film was pretty much going from its opening moments, and it went exactly in that direction. Tim Robbins, playing an adult survivor of a childhood abduction and molestation, does incredibly well at creating a suspicious yet sympathetic character. He, though, is also saddled with a plot contrivance that was brought in from the book, where he doesn't share crucial information at a point when you would expect him to, even when he can. That's an incredibly frustrating thing to watch in any film, where you feel that the characters are withholding information merely to service the film's plot. Kevin Bacon, playing the third lead character, has far less to do in the film. He's saddled with a strangely-filmed subplot involving his wife, who calls on the phone throughout the film but doesn't speak and whose face is never shown. His character, as well, isn't as well-rounded as the other leads. In supporting roles, the amazing Laura Linney and Marcia Gay Harden play the spouses of men caught up in a bizarre murder mystery. Linney's closing speech at the end of the film is so good that I wished the film had more moments with her in them. Harden's final scene is compelling and heartbreaking. All in all, I thought MYSTIC RIVER was an incredibly acted, flawed mystery film.
Rating:
Summary: Not too shabby
Review: Clint Eastwood adapts a powerful drama that examines both the suppression of marring experiences and the consequences of taking justice into ones own hands.
Sean Penn leads a superb cast that will be sure to dazzle even those tougher critics, such as myself. Each character is carefully constructed and the way in which the characters play against each other is excellent.
This film is also a refreshing change from the banal hollywood excesses that are so often dwelled upon. Here is a film that examines the true spirit of humanity. It is worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Mystic River - A Great Movie to See
Review: I didn't know what to think of the movie before I went to go see it. I had only seen one preview, and remembered only that it took place in Boston, where I live. It turned out to be one of the better movies i've seen in a long time. The only downside was all the violence and blood that swas shown, but it did add another element to the movie. The casting of the characters was great. Definitely a movie to be seen.
Rating:
Summary: Good story marred by over-the-top Lady Macbeth ending
Review: "Mystic River" is Director Clint Eastwood's movie. His fingerprints are all over it. The framing of the two shots of Dave Boyle's drives in the backseat of a car - one at age 11, the other in adulthood - are great pieces of craft. When Dave accepts that second ride, you know the day's going to end up badly for him. The other thing to say here is that somebody has done their homework on Southie life. The little things like the corner store filling up after Sunday mass, the parents hanging out on the porch listening to the Red Sox, bringing over a case of beer to help the mourning process...these are all pitch perfect. Now, on the other hand, everyone wants to have a go at the Boston accent, and the results are mixed. Robin Willams won an Oscar, after all, misplacing his R's in Good Will Hunting, even though he famously mangled his sentences beyond recognition. In "Mystic River," the attempts are all over the map. The men - Bacon, Robbins, Penn, Fishburne - give it a decent go (that's a rough ranking order). Of course, every time one of these guys interacts with a true Bostonian (they're easy to spot), you get a feel for how much of the richness and flavor they've left out. The women are a different story. Marcia Gay Harden is difficult to judge because of the role. She's in a perpetual state of fright/shock/fear that masks the accent. Cool. The role calls for that and she delivers. But, whoo! Laura Linney!! Man, oh, man. I mean, I love Laura Linney (esp. "You Can Count on Me") but her accent here is, as they say in professional cycling, "beyond category." At one point during her "Lady Macbeth" scene towards the end, she's telling Sean Penn "I can feel yo-uh hot, Jimmy." She said this a couple of times. My wife and I looked at each other..."What the heck is she saying?" Oh!! "Heart! She's trying to say 'heart'!" Talk about weird. Out of nowhere, the movie gets all Shakespearean on us. Linney's character - part of the woodwork until this very late point in the movie - starts telling Jimmy that "you can run this town." I understand the implied tie-in to Boston's famous Bulger case, but I think the whole thing could have been more subtly done. I mean, Linney's character is named "Annabeth" for crying out loud.
Rating:
Summary: Tied for first so far this year!
Review: What a wondeful film! A masterpiece! Clint Eastwood's direction in this film is flawless. Marcia Gay Harden, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins' performences are breathtaking (most notably Marcia Gay Harden as a torn wife not knowing whether to fear or support her husband). Even the rest of the cast from the largest (Kevin Bacon) to the smallest (Penn's character's daughter) supporting role are great. And that's only the surface! The story is basically what you think is a common murder mystery. I must applaude Clint Eastwood for setting a smooth pace for the film that didn't extend too long and wasn't too short. But the real greatness in this film is the psychological study of three men, broken and brought back together by tragedy, and two wives: one who fears her husband (Gay Harden) and one who supports him no matter what (a Lady Macbeth-like Laura Linney). If the artistic, profound mental part of the film weren't there than I wouldn't call it a masterpiece. But it's there, so next to Lost In Translation, I declare it the best film so far in 2003. There are a couple disclaimers. First of all, the movie is incredibly depressing, from beginning to end. You must be prepared for this. Second, it's not a family film. Don't take your children under the age of eleven to see this. There are some issues in this film that aren't good for little children to be exposed to at that age. And there is a lot of language and some violence. And usually, I would say for a third or fourth reason that there are some sections that may put you to sleep. All I can say is: GO SEE THIS MOVIE! YOU WON'T BE DISSAPOINTED! Bottom Line: Great film! (I give it an A+)
Rating: 
Summary: Well-told but dismal story.
Review: This is a well-told and well-acted film about violence, degradation and misery. It is not easy to watch. The characters suffer and die but don't learn or grow. If you want to see how organized crime families get their start and rationale for being, you will enjoy this film. If you would rather see some sense made of the suffering of characters that you care about, you'll want to pass on this one.
Rating:
Summary: "Mystic River" is Eastwood's finest masterpiece to date!
Review: Directed by double Academy Award winner Clint Eastwood (Best Director and Best Picture, "Unforgiven" (1992)) from a screenplay by Brian Helgeland ("L.A. Confidential"), based on a bestseller by ace mystery writer Dennis Lehane, and starring such respected, actorly heavyweights as Sean Penn ("I Am Sam"), Tim Robbins ("Mission to Mars"), Kevin Bacon ("Flatliners"), Laurence Fishburne (The "Matrix" films), Marcia Gay Harden ("Meet Joe Black"), and Laura Linney ("The Mothman Prophecies"), "Mystic River" has as unimpeachable a pedigree as any American studio film in history. And though it may not quite be the masterpiece that the early buzz suggests, it certainly makes the most of the tremendous talents at its disposal. A mournful meditation on revenge and guilt, "Mystic River" is perhaps Eastwood's most mature and moving examination yet of what has always been his great subject: the peculiarly American juxtaposition of vigilante violence and official justice. The film flows from two linked moments of violence, which, in turn, beget other violence -- one moment that pulls three childhood friends apart and another, 30 years later, that brings them back together. "Mystic River" opens in the '70s (the period established by a transistor radio broadcasting a Red Sox game with Luis Tirant on the mound), in a working-class neighborhood, as three boys play street hockey. There's Dave, who seems a little slow, Jimmy, a reckless kid who wants to steal a neighborhood car for joyriding, and Sean, a cautious kid who frowns on Jimmy's plan. Finding a slab of sidewalk where the concrete is still wet, the boys begin writing their names only to be confronted by two older men posing as cops, who take Dave away in the back of their car, where he is kept for several days and sexually abused before escaping. Flashing forward to the same neighborhood decades later, Dave (Robbins) is an introverted husband and father who doesn't seem to have quite recovered from his childhood ordeal. Jimmy (Penn) is an ex-con who runs a corner grocery store in the neighborhood but is still crime-connected. And Sean (Bacon) is now a Boston homicide detective, an outsider in the old neighborhood, working his beat with an astute African-American partner named Whitey (Fishburne). Jimmy and Dave are still friends -- Jimmy's ice-queen wife Annabeth (Linney) is a cousin of Dave's warm but (understandibly) skittish wife Celeste (Harden) -- but all three friends are brought together when Jimmy's 19 year-old daughter Katie (Emmy Rossum) turns up missing, and later dead, on the same night that Dave returns home late covered in someone else's blood. A distraught Jimmy, not waiting for the legal system to work, has a couple of his neighborhood goons out looking for the killer, while Sean is assigned to work the case. (The parallel police and underworld investigations might be a nod to Fritz Lang's serial-killer masterpiece 'M', which would only be a beginning to the debt "Mystic River" owes to Lang's artful police procedurals.) As Sean and Whitey investigate the case, dual clues point strongly to two suspects: Dave, one of the last people to see Katie alive, and a neighborhood boy whom she had been dating. By acclimation, "Mystic River" is Clint Eastwood's finest film since 1992's Oscar-winner "Unforgiven", and you'll find no argument here. A handsome, old-fashioned film, it's so stately, so measured, and so elegant that it acts as a formal rebuke to most other contemporary studio takes on this kind of material. "Mystic River" is a mystery spiked with deep emotion and considerable gravitas. It has a tremendous feel for its location, for this almost tribal old-school neighborhood on the brink of gentrification. It's marked by a tight vocabulary of formal elements -- sure crosscutting and sweeping pans over the film's title waterway. Most of all, it seems intentionally driven by a vast series of doubles and rhymes: two wives, two mute witnesses, two murders, two investigations, two friends whose lives go in opposite directions, two heartbreaking shots -- 30 years apart -- of Dave in the backseat of a car being taken away. And this matches the film's series of actorly one-on-one confrontations: Dave and Celeste, Dave and Jimmy, Celeste and Jimmy, Jimmy and Sean, Jimmy and Annabeth. But Eastwood's precise, conservative direction makes room for occasional visual flourishes, such as the operatic matching aerial shots that show Katie's bloodied, beaten body, found in a park, and nearby Jimmy howling as he's held back by a phalanx of cops. As one might expect, "Mystic River" is as much an actor's film as it is a director's. Its performances are uniformly excellent, with Sean Penn's and Tim Robbins' showy turns perhaps bested by Marcia Gay Harden, whose doting but doubtful wife is perhaps the film's most tragic figure. "Mystic River" isn't perfect. Laura Linney's underwritten part makes Annabeth's sinister, ruthless late transformation seem awkward and abrupt, and sometimes Eastwood reaches a little too much for effect (or for the Oscar) when the generally understated music swells more than necessary. But these are just quibbles. "I'm gonna find him. I'm gonna find him before the police do and I'm gonna kill him," Jimmy says as he stands over Katie's lifeless body. His insistence on keeping that promise is the source of Eastwood's most effective critique yet of American vigilante justice. "Mystic River" ends with a patriotic neighborhood parade, all the film's major characters in the crowd. It looks welcoming and friendly, but for one character it's a moment of horror and loss that brings "Mystic River" full circle. In conclusion, a powerful cast and superb direction by Clint Eastwood makes this story of violence and justice an unforgettable one. A DVD must-own when released!
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece...Eastwood's best since Unforgiven!!
Review: Mystic River is a cinematic masterpiece. At once haunting and serene, Mystic River manages to give is viewers a sense of closure in the end while maintaining its depressing tone throughout the length of the movie. Penn, Robbins, Fishburne, Bacon, Linney and Gay-Harden provide superlative performances,while struggling with the South Boston accent, yet in the end that hardly matters as their characters are brought to life. Tim Robbins has excelled himself once again after the Shawshank Redemption as Dave, the tortured soul who is unable to forget the tormented four days in his childhood when he was abducted by a pedophile. As a whole, Mystic River is an excellant adaptation of the novel and Eastwood does an excellant job of using the South Boston neighborhood to complement his storytelling.
Rating:
Summary: A True Work of Art!
Review: I won't get into describing the plot of this remarkable film, too many reviewers have already done that. I will say that it is one of the best studies of morality, revenge, loyalty and memory (with its often devastating consequences) that I've ever seen. It's hard to take at times, but if you stick with it the rewards are immeasurable. Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Marcia Gay Harden are near perfect in the vulnerable skin of their respective characters. And all the others, including Kevin Bacon, Laura Linney and Laurence Fishburne are profoundly memorable as well. This is quite a film that will resonate with me for many months, and perhaps years, to come.
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