What makes a movie like The Departed very good is that it presents a complete aesthetic vision. It is about what(ever) it is about at every plausible level of interpretation: it achieves a genuine cohesion of form and content. Or, which is to say the same thing, a genuinely felicitous rejection of that opposition, which is, as we all know, though we pretend to have outgrown the vocabulary, no mean feat. Moreover, it is not unpleasant to find one's early judgments vindicated, though doubt were cast upon them.