Childhood buddies Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich join up as Bushwhackers, skilled horseback gunmen executing daring raids on the North's soldiers and sympathisers, in this thrillingly sumptuous, hard-riding Civil War panorama.

Their unit, including the gentlemanly Simon Baker and his loyal ex-slave Jeffrey Wright, find shelter from the harsh winter of 1862 in a hillside dugout, where they are befriended by a young widow (Jewel).

Ang Lee, director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, elicits telling performances from his eager young cast in a film of extraordinary ambition, intelligence and beauty.

The small-canvas coming-of-age story slots in perfectly to the epic-scale Western action, as Lee pays meticulous attention to historical accuracy, human feeling and occasional bursts of gut-wrenching action, particularly the in-your-face staging of the massacre of the entire town of Lawrence, Kansas.