Clint Eastwood's second life.(Now Playing)

By all accounts, Clint Eastwood should have long since ridden into the sunset.

His career began as a minor contract player for Universal Pictures in 1955 and went on to blossom in violent genre pictures: spaghetti Westerns that first catapulted him to fame, then the Dirty Harry cop dramas that later defined his image. At 73, Eastwood should be an aging action star, a has been content with a career tribute every few years to remind him of who he once was.

But Eastwood refuses to become a Hollywood dinosaur. In recent decades he has methodically carved out a second career as one of America's most vital directors. A traditional genre craftsman, he's managed to put his personal stamp on a wide variety of films. His twenty-fourth directing effort, Mystic River, stands among the crowning achievements. Having spent his childhood traversing California while his father sought work during the Depression, Eastwood is a determined laborer, and indeed has taken on more films than he could possibly polish to excellence. The 1971 Play Misty For Me, the silly romance thriller that served as his directorial debut, is downright awful, and his entire career is a hit-or miss affair. For every sublime Mystic River, we get a miserable True Crimes.

And then there are numerous efforts in between--respectable films like his early Western Pale Rider or his recent FBI drama Blood Work. Seemingly oblivious to box-office results and fluctuating critical responses, Eastwood just keeps at his work, year in and year out, like a tradesman who rises early every day to get the job done. That work ethic would be admirable in any case, so it's doubly pleasing that it has led to a number of cinematic gems.

Eastwood has a way of adding personal details to genre stories to make them his own without sapping their wide appeal. That certainly is the case with Mystic River, an adaptation of a Dennis Lehane ...