Now that Ben Affleck's second film as Director (The Town) has been released to critical acclaim, it's worth taking another look at his first one. Gone Baby Gone was obviously no fluke. It's also worth considering because of the recent success of Martin Scorcese's Shutter Island, as both are based on novels by Dennis Lehane, surely now a celebrity author.

It is easy to be attracted to the Film Noir thriller style of Lehane's work, but the payoff is worth so much more as his stories explore depths of character fairly unusual in the genre. In Gone Baby Gone, it is particularly sharp and Ben Affleck and his brilliant cast, headed by younger brother Casey, handle the shift in tone from hard-nosed detective thriller to moral drama with ease. There are a couple of necessary contrivances, but this is no simple hunt the bad guy plot and gives us relevant social commentary too. There are consequences to an excruciating dilemma that will leave you thinking long after the film has finished.

It starts straightforward enough; a young girl is missing, suspected kidnapped and the local community is united around the family, but the girl's mother is completely unhelpful and soon it's revealed she's a drug runner, mixed up with some very dangerous characters. Patrick (Casey Affleck) and Angie (Michelle Monaghan) take on the case as they have slightly better prospects interviewing the locals because they're locals too, so they start digging through Boston's underbelly.

The film has a top drawer cast, including effective and powerful performances from Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman, and so it's all the more impressive that baby-face Casey more than holds his own with the heavyweights, just like his character does against Boston's criminal class. He's tough, direct, but calm and focused, while hiding deep emotional turmoil. A fantastic performance, possibly his best and that's a big statement considering his work in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

And finally as Casey's partner, the gorgeous Michelle Monaghan gets a role she deserves! She's excellent in a very important role; the film could live or die on that performance, especially in the final act and she handles it brilliantly. You'll watch Casey, but you'll remember Michelle.

This is a film that lives and breathes the Affleck brothers' home town and Boston is as much a character as anyone else, in the same way that San Francisco was such a huge part of Dirty Harry. In fact, Gone Baby Gone was released around the same time as David Fincher's Zodiac and even that superb film falters in comparison because Fincher failed to capture San Francisco in the same way. Blu-Ray seemed to highlight a stagey aspect of Zodiac, but gives Gone Baby Gone another level of substance as the bright locations lend the film a sense of time, place and honesty. Even more so than Scorcese's The Departed. People tend to skew toward the big blockbusters for Blu-Ray material when in fact it should be sharply photographed real settings like this. John Toll's cinematography is unusually bright for a story such as this, but it works wonders.

So I've compared Ben Affleck the Director to names like Fincher and Scorcese and that will still cause a frown for a lot of people, I'm sure! But he deserves the praise and the rewards, especially now The Town is doing so well. Gone Baby Gone is a relevant and rich piece of work, which may suffer from a confused middle act, but ultimately delivers its enduring message with assured confidence. Hell of a debut.