Gone Baby Gone
One-sentence review: Ben Affleck is an adequate director; Amy Ryan is a dynamite actor. OK, I’ll give you a bit more, even though it’s been a while since I crammed this movie in as part of my pre-Oscar preparation. I was happy Tilda Swinton won Best Supporting Actress for “Michael Clayton” — in part because I predicted it — but Ryan, a New York stage veteran perhaps best known before this movie for “The Wire,” was equally deserving. She’s authentic and harrowing as a South Boston drug addict and petty criminal whose 4-year-old daughter is kidnapped. Ryan’s Helene McCready is an unapologetic monster who refuses to compromise her complete lack of principles. She enjoys being the center of a media firestorm when her girl disappears. Without giving it away, Ryan has a couple of extraordinary, skin-crawling moments at the end of the movie, where she makes clear that Helene is unchanged by her ordeal. “Gone Baby Gone” is uneven, with a plot that strains credulity — maybe it’s easier to swallow in its original form, a novel by Dennis Lehane that I can only presume is dense and sprawling — but it has a killer final scene, one that acknowledges the bewildering murk that separates right from wrong, winners from losers. While Affleck sometimes strains just to get the camera in the right place, he deserves credit for crafting such a rich and unsettling conclusion, and for letting Ryan knock it out of the park. (To be fair, Affleck happens upon some elegant imagery, thanks in part to his shrewd choice of the maestro John Toll as his cinematographer — a decision that suggests he’s at least aware of his shortcomings.)