Product Description

Three friends who grew up in working-class Boston drift apart after a terrible tragedy. Years later, brutal events reconnect them. Jimmy's 19-year-old daughter is coldly murdered. Dave is a suspect. And Sean, now a cop, scrambles to solve the crime before volatile Jimmy takes the law into his own hands. Working from Brian Helgeland's adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel, director Clint Eastwood shapes a masterful, brooding thriller built on family, friends and innocence lost. Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon play the pivotal threesome, joining Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney in one of the most powerful casts ever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31497 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2010-02-02
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Color, NTSC, Widescreen
• Original language: English, French, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 138 minutes

Amazon.com
Superior acting, writing, and direction are on impressive display in the critically acclaimed Mystic River, Clint Eastwood's 24th directorial outing and one of the finest films of 2003. Sharply adapted by L.A. Confidential Oscar-winner Brian Helgeland from the novel by Dennis Lehane, this chilling mystery revolves around three boyhood friends in working-class Boston--played as adults by Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, and Kevin Bacon--drawn together by a crime from the past and a murder (of the Penn character's 19-year-old daughter) in the present. These dual tragedies arouse a vicious cycle of suspicion, guilt, and repressed anxieties, primed to explode with devastating and unpredictable results. Eastwood is perfectly in tune with this brooding material, giving his flawless cast (including Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden and Laurence Fishburne) ample opportunity to plumb the depths of a resonant human tragedy, leading to an ambiguous ending that qualifies Mystic River for contemporary classic status. --Jeff Shannon

From The New Yorker
Clint Eastwood's sombre masterpiece, from a novel by Dennis Lehane (Brian Helgeland did the adaptation), is about a working-class Catholic community in Boston held in thrall by an old crime. Back in the seventies, one of three eleven-year-old boys who were close friends was taken away by two men pretending to be cops and sexually assaulted for days before he finally escaped. But it turns out that Dave (Tim Robbins) never escaped at all. Twenty-five years later he is still shrouded in dreams and terror, and his two friends, Sean (Kevin Bacon), a homicide detective, and Jimmy (Sean Penn), an ex-con who runs a corner grocery, still feel the shame of not helping him. When Jimmy's nineteen-year-old daughter is murdered, the three are uneasily brought back together again. The movie's feeling for the neighborhood milieu is so convincing because there's no distinction between background and foreground-everything we see (faces, living rooms, back yards, weather, battered old cars) is dramatically relevant. Eastwood directs in a gray, end-of-day light and with a minimum of camera rhetoric; he lets the script and the actors do the work. Kevin Bacon tightens his facial muscles into a mask; Tim Robbins looks puffy and frightened; and Sean Penn does a few semi-psychotic soliloquies in which he takes off into the stratosphere, joining Marlon Brando as one of the great tragic actors of the screen. With Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney, both in devastating form. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker