City by the Sea

Vincent LaMarca is a New York homicide detective whose professional record is beyond reproach. He has spent his life enforcing the law, in part to separate himself from a painful family history, and he has kept his distance from the son of his first marriage. That distance collapses when a murder investigation points toward his estranged son Joey, a drug addict who disappears before he can be questioned. Convinced he must bring the young man in himself, Vincent sets out to find him before his colleagues do, while the case forces him to confront his own failures as a father. Frances McDormand plays Michelle, his girlfriend, and William Forsythe appears as Spyder.

Michael Caton-Jones directed the film from a screenplay by Ken Hixon; it was the seventh of the eleven features listed for Caton-Jones, arriving between The Jackal (1997) and Basic Instinct 2 (2006). Robert De Niro heads the cast as Vincent, with James Franco as Joey, Eliza Dushku as Gina and Patti LuPone as Maggie. The production had a budget of 40 million dollars and returned about 22 million dollars worldwide.

On IMDb, the film holds a rating of 5.8 from 143 reviews, while on TMDB it stands at 5.8 from 398 votes, so critics and audiences are closely aligned on it. The film runs 108 minutes.