Fantastic!

Rating: 9/10 (3 July 2004)

Clint Eastwood's film is unsettling, designed to keep make you feel uneasy for a week afterwards, and it's largely successful.
As kids, Dave, Jimmy, and Sean were inseparable. Until the day thugs masquerading as cops abducted Dave and kept him in a cellar for four days. This, of course, messed Dave up a little, and as an adult he's not quite all there.
Fast-forward to the present. Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter Katie is brutally murdered, and suddenly the three friends, who have drifted a bit over the years, are brought back together. Sean, who's now a cop, is on the case.
The movie was nominated for six Oscars and won two (Penn as Jimmy, Robbins as Dave). To me, it was spellbinding. When I'm watching a movie at home, there are plenty of little distractions - Oh, I need something to eat, Oh, I gotta go to the bathroom, Oh, the dog needs to go out, and so forth - and as a result if the movie isn't totally compelling I'll watch it in installments. But with Mystic River I didn't even notice the time until the movie was nearly an hour old. Eastwood's direction - and Brian Helgeland's screenplay - were so mesmerizing that I was completely drawn into the movie, believing every second, feeling like I was a bystander, rather than an audience. That is excellent filmmaking.
Also in the incredible cast are Marcia Gay Harden (who earned a nomination herself), Laurence Fishburne, Laura Linney, and Tom Guiry. (Guiry has come into his own as an adult actor; I remember seeing him in 1993's The Sandlot as the new kid in town.)
A must-see for fans of mystery/suspense movies.