(Monument Ave.)
Director Ted Demme and screenwriter Mike Armstrong have come up with a skillful, hard-hitting gangster tale involving Irish hoodlums in Boston's blue-collar neighborhood of Charlestown. Denis Leary plays a heavy-drinking small-time thief, and the crew of actors he's surrounded by (Colm Meaney, Ian Hart, Billy Crudup, and Famke Janssen, among others) never strike a false note-their working-class desperation is entirely believable. But it's Leary who's the real surprise here; his sincere, tough-guy performance is mesmerizing. He lifts the film above its familiar, claustrophobic environment into the gritty realism of very good urban drama.