By Travis Johnson
When he’s not dressing as a flying rodent and pummeling the mentally ill, Ben Affleck likes to make Beantown-set crime dramas, and the odd based-on-a-true-story Oscar triumph. His next film, which doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention since Ben pulled on the Batman cowl, is one of the former: Live By Night, an adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel of the same name.
It’s a good fit for Affleck and a good fit for Warners, a studio which made its bones putting out excellent crime and gangster films in ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. Affleck stars as Joe Coughlin, war veteran, cop’s son and bootlegger extraordinaire, whose exploits take him from Boston to Florida to Cuba to, as we can see plainly in at least one shot, jail. Chris Messina, Zoe Saldana, Sienna Miller, Brendan Gleeson, Titus Welliver snd Chris Cooper co-star.
Live by Night is due in January 2017.