Mystic River

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Eastwood directs Mystic River with an invigorated grace and gravitas. This is a true American beauty of a movie, a tale of men and their bonds told by and for adults who value the old-fashioned Hollywood-studio notion of narrative.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Mystic River is the rare American movie that aspires to -- and achieves -- the full weight and darkness of tragedy.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Clint Eastwood pours everything he knows about directing into Mystic River. His film sneaks up, messes with your head and then floors you. You can't shake it. It's that haunting, that hypnotic.

The New Yorker David Denby

As close as we are likely to come on the screen to the spirit of Greek tragedy (and closer, I think, than Arthur Miller has come on the stage). The crime of child abuse becomes a curse that determines the pattern of events in the next generation. [13 October 2003, p. 112]

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

To see strong acting like this is exhilarating. In a time of flashy directors who slice and dice their films in a dizzy editing rhythm, it is important to remember that films can look and listen and attentively sympathize with their characters. Directors grow great by subtracting, not adding, and Eastwood does nothing for show, everything for effect.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Mystic River is classic Eastwood, classic noir. If there is still some doubt about whether this one-time macho star is actually a world-class moviemaker, Mystic River should end the argument for good. One of the best American movies of the year, crisply well-crafted and beautifully acted.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A major American motion picture, an overpowering piece of work that involves some of the most basic human emotions: love, hate, fear, revenge, despair. Directed by Clint Eastwood with absolute confidence and remarkable control.

San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer

Chilling, superbly acted.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Moves along its course and overflows at its climax with that indefinable but unmistakable assurance of a master filmmaker who knows just what he wants to say, is in total command of his medium and is in no mood to make any compromises.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

This kind of quiet ambiguity, avoiding easy answers to complex human conflicts, is all too rare in American movies.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Eastwood's elegantly directed Mystic River, a deeply textured drama in which the sins (or perceived sins) of the past weigh heavily on the present.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

Perhaps the greatest, most affecting articulation of the theme Eastwood has been exploring since 1990's "White Hunter Black Heart": how violence--real violence, not movie violence--perpetrated and experienced, can erode and/or obliterate the human soul.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

The performances are uniformly remarkable.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Eastwood has crafted one of the most powerful American dramas in years.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

If Mystic River is just a bit overplayed, a tad too highly pitched, it still resonates with grief and fury and feeling.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Mystic River is hard-boiled beyond toughness: It's so tender the skin falls away from the bone. It's Eastwood's most soulful, and most organic, movie.

Variety Todd McCarthy

This full-bodied adaptation of Dennis Lehane's involved and involving 2001 bestselling crime novel about old friends in Boston's working-class Irish neighborhood finds Clint Eastwood near the top of his directorial game with a cast of first-rate actors.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Sean Penn is so frighteningly good in this movie that he outdoes even the best of his earlier work.

Newsweek David Ansen

A haunted thriller of disturbing power.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

In his best film since "Unforgiven," Eastwood ultimately lets observations on character, community, and the tidal patterns of tragedy shoulder a burden an ordinary murder mystery never could.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Mystic River asks plenty of questions but rarely if ever offers any answers, and certainly no easy ones. If this fine and sorrowful film is what can be expected from our aging cinema icons, here’s to the golden years, dark though they may be.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Deals with themes Eastwood has often explored before, but never so delicately or with as much sad wisdom: The way in which our past haunts our present, the lasting repercussions of violence and the cruel inexorability of fate.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

So incrementally does Eastwood's film build toward what seems like an inevitable resolution that when it concludes, you're sucker-punched. You haven't been watching a police procedural, but a Greek tragedy. You haven't been watching a drama about the catharsis of vigilantism, but sitting vigil for a community diminished, and permanently damaged, by violence.

USA Today Staff (Not Credited)

River ranks with the best movies Eastwood has directed: "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Unforgiven" and "The Bridges of Madison County." But this time, the work is strong without his own on-screen presence -- a significant achievement.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

The white-knuckle center of the movie is Sean Penn, who gives an utterly raw performance as Jimmy, father of the dead girl. It's one of the few times that a parent's grief has felt real on the screen through all its ugly permutations.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

This is a powerful tale of crime, guilt, and punishment -- a drama that incorporates elements of whodunit mystery/thrillers and police procedurals with a richly textured three-character play.

Slate David Edelstein

For all its missteps, Mystic River gets the big things right: It turns you inside out with grief, and it builds to an act of vigilante murder that is nearly impossible to endure.

Film Threat K.J. Doughton

Echoes Eastwood’s previous exploration of true-life violence, “Unforgiven,” by tracing how death and depravity stain one’s life for generations, leaving seeds to take root in each branch of a tainted family tree.

Empire Alan Morrison

Two things make Eastwood's task easier for him: a superb cast and a cracking source novel. Dennis Lehane's book is one of the very best thrillers of recent years, richer in Boston detail and closer in character study than anything Eastwood manages to bring to the screen.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The grandest presence here is Eastwood. His directing, like his acting, is minimal: unhurried, spare, unforced, rather somber.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

This is at bottom a pulp thriller that strains -- sometimes pretentiously, at other times with gutter magnificence -- to reach the level of basic human truths.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

One of those rare recent films whose emotional power resonates long after you've left the theater.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The acting throughout is exceptional, rooted in observed realism, but suggestive of more mythical agents at work through the lives of human beings.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Where Lehane's novel seethes with emotionally charged subtext, Eastwood's workmanlike direction feels static -- fatally tasteful, embalmed in gravitas -- while his sporadic efforts at dramatic heightening come off as vulgar cliché.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

An urban crime thriller of considerable gravitas.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

If he were a more subtle director, it would be a great film; as it is, it's an extremely good one, anchored by the subtly devastating performances of Penn, Robbins and Bacon. The supporting cast is equally good, and blue collar Boston's mean streets take on a beaten-down life of their own.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Arguably Eastwood's most ambitious film since his multi-Oscar winner, "Unforgiven." But it lacks the power and depth of that film's dynamic script by David Webb Peoples.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Little more than the distended first half of a twisty, dark "Law & Order" script.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The performances, especially of Penn and Robbins, are so powerful and detailed (down to the Boston accents) that they often persuade one to overlook the narrative contrivances (particularly the incessant crosscutting), the arty trimmings (including Eastwood's own score), and the dubious social philosophy.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Mystic River wants to be a Bruce Springsteen-like anthem of life and death in blue-collar America. It's no more than a doggerel rendition of poetic injustice.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

If this death-obsessed drama is a classic, then give me potboiling life.

Film Threat Phil Hall

The new bad movie from Clint Eastwood which takes Dennis Lehane's best-selling thriller and turns it into an inert mess that clocks in at 137 minutes but feels like 137 hours.