The Coen Brothers' finest film is an ultra-violent prohibition gangster thriller, with a plot containing more twists than a Curly-Wurly and music to the ears rat-a-tat-tat dialogue.

Gabriel Byrne is Tom Regan, the man behind the man caught in the middle of a mob war between reigning boss Leo (Albert Finney) and Italian upstart Johnny Kaspar (Jon Polito).

Tom shifts allegiances, but who is playing who, and will wild card Bernie (John Turturro) ruin the game?

Loosely based on Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (previously made as Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars) this is a modern masterpiece where everything just clicks.

The cast are pitch-perfect, the dialogue sizzling ("So you wanna kill him?" "For starters.") and the direction remarkably assured.

The Coens made this after hitting it big with the baby-caper Raising Arizona, but Miller's Crossing resembles Blood Simple or Fargo with its gallery of dislikeable characters and shocking bursts of violence.

Although peppered with laugh-out-loud one-liners, the film is a dark, dark thriller replete with betrayal, revenge, menace, queasy moral codes and violence... lots of violence.

So much violence that the film originally earned an "18" certificate solely for onscreen brutality. But, in these post-Hostel times it has been downgraded to a (high end) "15".

Maybe the reason Miller's Crossing is not remembered as one of the best gangster films (up there with The Roaring Twenties or The Godfather) is because it gleefully roots for the wrong characters.

Leo, dating Bernie's sister, protects him from Johnny despite Bernie selling fixed-fight information. And Tom sides with Leo despite realizing Johnny is right, until a betrayal puts him in the Italian's camp.

A potential nose-bleed of a plot is expertly told by the Brothers C and played by a cast who realize cinematic gold when they strike it.

Man of the match must be Polito as the tragi-comic Johnny, while special mention goes to Marcia Gay Harden as Verna, Leo's squeeze who plays all the boys.

And in JK Freeman's The Dane, gangster films have the meanest bootlegger since Sonny Corleone was on the receiving end of hot lead at the toll-booth.

A perfect film, with a cameo from Sam Raimi and a healthy love for hats, it's the best film from two of the best filmmakers around. And every slasher film heroine facing an unstoppable killer should heed Polito's advice - "Always put one in the brain."

Rob Daniel