This year marks the 10th anniversary of Ben Affleck’s Boston crime-opus The Town. In honor of its release, we bring you 14 other movies that you should add to your watchlist if you enjoyed this iconic addition to the Irish-American crime-drama. While not all these movies are centered around Bostonians, or even take place there, they all share strong thematic and stylistic ties that can be grouped under the loose umbrella terms of “heist” or “crime movie”. Now, without further ado:
Moving into the 2000’s, our first entry from the new millennium is Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. This is one of the bleakest entries on this list and perhaps one of the bleakest mainstream Hollywood films of the century thus far, dealing with themes of childhood trauma, sexual abuse, murder, betrayal, and vengeance.
The story opens with three childhood friends, Jimmy, Sean, and Dave, playing street hockey in Boston, when suddenly a car arrives with two men who take Dave away. Years later, Dave (played to perfection by a fractured, insular Tim Robbins) is revealed to have been sexually abused by the men who abducted him and is still struggling to cope with his trauma when he is implicated in the murder of Jimmy’s teenage daughter, Katie. Jimmy (Sean Penn), a former con who has stepped away from his criminal life, pursues his own form of an investigation into the murder, while Sean (Kevin Bacon), now a detective with the Massachusetts State Police, closes in on the truth. The film’s dark subject matter is matched by Clint Eastwood’s cold, eerie visual palette— a seemingly interminable overcast Northeastern climate, all muted blue-gray tones, and hard, shadowy night exteriors. This film further cemented Clint’s place among the top of the world’s filmmaking ranks and proved him to be a studio-filmmaker unafraid of exploring the darker corners of human nature.
