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Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) and Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) duke it out in the rooftop climax of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. The film opened last week, taking in $26.9 million, the biggest opening-weekend gross in the director’s 40-year career.

After a few weeks of disappointing movie premieres in Athens, two new releases deliver a dizzying one-two punch — an indie from a promising first-time filmmaker and a flashy crime drama from a veteran director.

Both are two of the most thrilling and unflinchingly gritty movies in months. Half Nelson

One look at Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) tells it all. With his spring-loaded frame and forlorn stare, he seems like someone who has been chewed up and spit out of the educational system — not someone who is part of it.

But every weekday he teaches history to junior high students at an inner-city school, lighting up with an idealistic fervor as he turns history into a compelling analysis of dialectics, the push and pull of opposing forces.

Dunne also lights up outside of class, descending into a crack addiction that lands him nearly unconscious in a bathroom stall one night after he coaches the girl’s basketball team. When a player, Drey (Shareeka Epps), finds him, they begin to share his secret and a slowly forming friendship.

Director Ryan Fleck evades being preachy and sentimental, instead developing Drey and Dunne’s characters through some remarkable scenes. The paths of their after-school lives intersect in a moment late in the film that has an uncanny power for a movie otherwise intimate and subtle.

Like many indies, Half Nelson revels in its prodigious use of handheld camera work and ambiguous conclusion, but it towers above the norm because of Gosling. The star of The Notebook has had a rough record as of late, but he’s headed to an Oscar nomination. Dunne is a difficult character to grasp at first, but he turns his dual existence into art. The Departed

Martin Scorsese’s newest film is the next step in the evolution of the gritty crime drama, cell phones replacing phone booths and multi-layered characterizations subbing for one-note cops and robbers.

The tale of moles inside a Boston crime syndicate and the state police (Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, respectively) also is a beautiful return to form for the most technically savvy director of the modern era who has stumbled lately with Gangs of New York and The Aviator.

After those two movies, The Departed’s prolific bursts of violence, relentless profanity and frenetic cutting feel like the movie-crazy symphonies Marty makes best. It helps that the story is a labyrinthine plot of double cat-and-mouse that thickens by the minute.

With all the backstabbing, double-crossing and scenery chewing courtesy of Jack Nicholson, it sometimes feels like The Departed might spin out of control, but Scorsese has a death grip that only solidifies his status as a master.

The real revelation, however, is DiCaprio, a 31-year-old who, until this film, had yet to escape his perpetual teenager image. With a full face and a tortured past, he gives a masterful performance that dumps his status as a “movie star” and establishes him as a great actor.

Leo and all, The Departed is what the movies are made for.