25th Hour

Reviewed by PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * )

The cinematic equivalent of a symphonic poem, Spike Lee's new film is a dazzlingly evocative elegy to the city of which Lee is effectively one of the filmmakers laureate.

It's the first film about New York which is explicitly set in a post 9/11 context (one scene takes place in an apartment overlooking a floodlit Ground Zero, as the site-clearing plods sombrely along) and it manages to convey much about the mood of the city while zooming in tight on a quintet of its denizens.

Deeply stylised - it is, in the end, less a story than a series of human interactions - it follows Monty Brogan (Norton), a drug dealer who is putting his affairs in order before beginning a prison sentence.

No one explains how a convict gets this unsupervised day of freedom before incarceration but Brogan uses the time to touch base with the important people in his life: his father (Cox), who guiltily accepted his son's tainted money to save his Staten Island bar; his attractive Latino girlfriend (Dawson) who may have sold him out to the cops; and his two mates, a high school teacher (Hoffman) in mid-life meltdown and a Wall Street shark (Pepper), both of whom fear more deeply for their mate than he does for himself.

The script, adapted from his own pre-9/11 novel by David Benioff, is richly suggestive, so the film can be read as a lament for the corrosive effects of greed (for all his smugness, Brogan shows at least traces of remorse) or for the seismic transformation of the city's culture wrought by the terrorist attacks. But it's as easily appreciated as a series of set pieces, some tenderly subtle, some - like the enraged, racist rant Brogan delivers to his own reflection in a men's room mirror - punchy and argumentative.

And Lee, whose syncopated editing adds to the disjointed effect, gives his actors plenty of room. A nightclub sequence in which Hoffman bumblingly succumbs to the seductive teasing of one of his students (Paquin) is a bravura piece of screen acting.

It's Lee's most ambitious film since Do The Right Thing and his best since the incomparable Jungle Fever, and if it only brushes against greatness that's possibly because it remains slightly aloof from its characters and it's marred by a longwinded and cutely ambiguous ending. But it's an inspired piece of ensemble work under the guiding hand of one of the age's truly masterful filmmakers.

Cast: Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Anna Paquin, Brian Cox

Director: Spike Lee

Running time: 130 mins

Rating: R13 (violence and offensive language)

Screening: Rialto, from Thursday