Hall's breathtaking cinematography, Mendes' quiet and beautifully dark direction, the laudatory and career best performance from Jude Law who has never been so compelling, Tom Hanks' damned soul Michael Sullivan trying to redeem the terrible live he's lead by leaving something beyond for his son even if that's just him breathing, Thomas Newman's evocative score, and just how alive such a movie about death and despicable men is. I probably shouldn't say this but sometimes I just switch my email off, the devil of 21st century work-life and get caught up in Conrad L.

If I wake up in a bad mood when I arrive at my desk on a morning to start work and I can't really get into the mood to write something, I always trust this father & son morality tale to transport me to a different world and suddenly I've lost two hours of my life to it.

(Oct.Sam Mendes' captivating and poetic 2002 gangster film Road to Perdition is a movie I watch five or six times a year, I have something of an unhealthy obsession with it. Like movie posters, his drawings capture the action with a combination of slick draftsmanship and the bleak and shadowy forms of cinematic noir. Though Rayner's b&w drawings can be static, they are precisely rendered with strikingly delineated faces. But O'Sullivan is essentially a superhero in a fedora, and his ability to kill an overwhelming number of adversaries with nary a scratch to show for it is a bit ridiculous. Collins writes a good gangster yarn based on historical personalities and full of crisp dialogue, violent action and brooding overtones of religious redemption. The Looneys go into hiding, and O'Sullivan and son set out to find them, encountering the celebrities of gangland Chicago along the way. They murder O'Sullivan's wife and younger son, leaving him stunned but determined to have his revenge. Fearing what the kid saw, the Looneys set the O'Sullivans up to be killed. He inadvertently witnesses his father and one of the Looneys murder a crooked cop and his partners. stows away in his car to see what he does for a living. Curious about his dad's mysterious 'job,' Michael Jr.

It's 1930 and O'Sullivan works for the Looneys, an Irish mob family with a stranglehold on the politics and businesses of a small Midwestern city. It's the story of Michael O'Sullivan, a feared and religiously inclined mob hit man who's brutally betrayed-and the fierce vengeance he wreaks. Originally published as a single-volume graphic novel in 1998, this is the comics work upon which the Tom Hanks movie is based.

Max allan collins road to perdition