Mystic River

It’s the early 1970s. One of three kids writing their names in fresh concrete in a bare-knuckle, blue-collar section of Boston is abducted. Twenty-five years later, we are introduced to the now-estranged friends. Dave (Tim Robbins) is a family man emotionally reeling from the four days of sexual abuse he survived during his kidnapping. Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con and street-element patriarch who runs a corner grocery store. Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a homicide detective with marital problems. The men are reunited when Jimmy’s 19-year-old daughter is murdered and Dave is identified as a suspect. Clint Eastwood directs this powerful, haunting, fluid story about fractured friendships, loyalty, sinister acts, moral ambiguity, the cancerous aftereffects of violence, and inner demons, with a narrative muscle rarely flexed in current American films.