You’re heard that Ben Affleck is the Next Great American Director, right? Well, now is the perfect time to dig into his oeuvre! Though he made a successful directorial debut with 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, he cemented his status as something decidedly other than Matt Damon’s smirky sidekick/J-Lo’s manicured yacht accessory with 2010’s The Town, a kinetic thriller about Boston’s notorious Charlestown bank robbers. I usually find action movies to be cliché-ridden blobs of bombast, but this one sharply captures each heist as an obstacle course of logistical ingenuity and acute emotion. The performances are uniformly strong–most notably Jeremy Renner as the mercurial, merciless Gem–and even the secondary characters (e.g. Jon Hamm’s manipulative FBI agent, Blake Lively’s misguided but loyal townie) are nuanced and intriguing.