Family Business

Rating: 9/10 (7 June 2008)

Over the last three or four decades it seems novelists and filmmakers have been working overtime to erase the image of Boston we acquired via the works of John P. Marquand and movies like The Late George Apley (from Marquand's novel) so that today we're used to seeing it as something of a Hell's Kitchen with a pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd accent. Gone Baby Gone reinforces this concept in an exceptionally fine movie whose screenplay was arguably written on onion skin and slowly peels away layer after layer until ending up almost diametrically opposite where it began. It's a movie of fine performances all the way down the line which is also well-plotted and approaching flawlessness.