Ash Wednesday

A gloomy remembrance of Hell's Kitchen past, set almost entirely over the course of a long, dismal day in 1983. Francis Sullivan (Ed Burns) is a reformed son of the old Hell's Kitchen, a working class, traditionally Irish neighborhood on Manhattan's West Side. Francis's late father, a brutal brawler who controlled the longshoremen's union, taught him the rules of the street while shielding Francis's college-bound younger brother, Sean (Elijah Wood), from the neighborhood's pervasive violence and corruption. After Sean's murder in 1980, Francis cleaned up his act with the help of seen-it-all parish priest Father Mahoney (James Handy); he now runs a bar and stays out o...