Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)

A loner janitor in Boston is called to his small coastal home town upon the death of his brother, to discover that he has been appointed the guardian of his teenage nephew in the will. It's immediately apparent that he left the town years before under a cloud, and the root cause for that unfolds through flashbacks and encounters with the locals.
He's very damaged goods, alternating between being sullenly withdrawn and abruptly violent, and Casey Affleck conveys the dichotomy credibly. The relationship with his nephew, who's outwardly cocksure, seeming to take his father's death in his stride, while being inwardly very brittle, is also affectingly portrayed. It never lapses into the formula of inevitable healing or bonding between clashing males and different generations: they remain co-passengers on a road of sorrow. The script is also confident enough in its emotional substance that it even allows humour to exist where it occurs naturally, without any danger of this trivialising the key theme. There is a flaw in that not only the protagonists but the film itself almost suffocate under the weight of their suppressed grief, leading to a lack of tonality, but it still deserves the plaudits it garnered for its fundamental truthfulness.

7/10