RECOMMENDED “I always believed it was the things you didn’t choose that make you who you are,” narrates young private investigator Patrick (Casey Affleck, “The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford”) in this adaptation of a Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River”) novel by Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard. In classic noir mode, Patrick makes this existential observation before he and his partner and lover Angie (Michelle Monaghan) are hired to trace a missing girl in their native Dorchester. The complexity of the storyline, as finely directed by Ben Affleck, is made by hard choices, and often bad choices, of flesh-and-blood characters—not by the handiwork of a plot-for-plot’s sake screenplay. Patrick will face a last-reel choice that makes clear the story’s deeper design: either path would lead to an equally profound ending. When characters utter such lines as “God made you barren” and “Murder is sin,” they speak with Old Testament bluntness. Tactical ethics never felt so ugly. With Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, John Ashton, Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver, Amy Ryan and a Brueghel gallery of Dorchester denizens for local discolor. 113m. (Bill Stamets)
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