Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Hell's Kitchen, New York. Terry Noonan returns home after a ten-year absence. He soon reconnects with Jackie, a childhood friend and member of the Irish mob, and rekindles his love affair with Jackie's sister Kathleen.
State of Grace is an underrated crime drama elevated significantly by Sean Penn's intense, committed performance and strong support from Ed Harris and Gary Oldman. Jordan Cronenweth's cinematography is genuinely exceptional — rich, atmospheric, and evocative of Hell's Kitchen's gritty twilight world. The plot is a fairly familiar undercover-cop-among-old-friends structure with a love triangle, competently executed but not particularly original. The ending delivers solid dramatic payoff with a memorably staged St. Patrick's Day shootout, though the overall arc follows genre expectations. Novelty is decent but not extraordinary — it finds its own mood and texture without reinventing the crime genre.