I don’t know if Ben Affleck is a great director, but I’ll tell you one thing: In my mind he makes a lot of directors who are considered good by critics look pretty bad (Clint Eastwood and Ridley Scott to name 2 off the top of my head.)

The Town is a well-crafted movie with excellent performances. It is paced effectively and has good dialog, especially by today’s standards. It is interesting, exciting, and the action sequences are staged and shot really well. There is so much mediocre action in today’s movies (a perfect recent example: Inception), that when you find yourself drifting to the edge of your seat during a film’s action sequences (as if you actually CARE about the outcome) you take notice. Credit Ben Affleck: it takes skill to blend all these fine qualities into a movie.

As an actor, Ben Affleck is drifting up toward the top of my favorites. He is a very natural actor, and has aged into a very warm and winning one. He’s great here as a tormented bank robber with a tiny-but-growing heart who wants out. Really great. The guy playing the best friend (Jeremy Renner) is just off-the-charts fabulous! It helps of course that both roles are well-written, but still these actors make the most of the fine writing.

In supporting roles, Blake Lively and Rebecca Hall are terrific. (Rebecca Hall is in my opinion always a good thing in any movie she appears in.) Jon Hamm is a little uneven and two-dimensional as the FBI agent, but the film works so well as a whole that this does not seriously detract from the overall experience.

What’s remarkable about The Town, at least by today’s standards, is how it immerses you in the strange criminal culture of Charletown, MA and develops characters in that setting, and at the same time sustains a parallel police story. No, the police angle is not fabulously executed, but it is basically effective and more importantly has a consistent place in the movie from start to finish. In its own way, The Town is almost a poor cousin of something like The Day of the Jackal, when you find yourself weirdly routing for the bad guys, while following the developing action from both sides simultaneously.

As is inevitable for this genera, there are some cardboard, prick gangster-types with zero emotional range floating around (saying things like “I clipped your daddy’s balls!” with a husky, menacing voice) but the scenes with these people are short and to the point, not glamorized or saddled with inflated importance, and thus do not detract from the film.

Ignore the New York Times critics. I highly recommend it!