FORGET the names Hanks, Newman and Law. As good as their performances are in Road To Perdition, the real star of this show is a guy called Conrad L Hall.

Hall is this movie's director of photography and it is his lighting or rather lack of it that will probably linger in the memory more than anything else after the final credits have rolled.

Mood, atmosphere and menace are the foundations of Road To Perdition and effective use of darkness and shadow particularly that beneath the brim of a fedora is at once beautiful and unsettling. Much like the film in general, in fact a film in which the line between good and evil is a very thin one.

Set in a cold and wet winter of 1931, we're introduced to proceedings by care-free 12-year-old Michael Sulli-van Jr (Hoechlin), whose seemingly cosy domestic existence neatly covers the fact that his Pa Michael Sr (Hanks) is a hit-man for local bigwig John Rooney (Newman).

While aware that their dad is in Rooney's employ, Michael Jr and his younger brother are ignorant of what his job actually involves until curiosity gets the better of the older son who spies Michael Sr at work, brandishing a Tommy gun with the same professional ease and skill as a builder with bricks and mortar.

What the boy sees has a devastating effect on him and his family and sets in motion a sequence of events that put the two Michaels on the road in a desperate flight from powerful criminals who need them dead.

It is this journey that gives the film its emotional core, examining the bond between father and son and how Michael Sr is determined to keep Michael Jr's innocence untarnished and untouched by his old man's evil.

As a theme for the movie, it works well, neatly balanced with the frustration Rooney has with his own son Connor (Craig), a loose cannon whose misguided actions leave his father with a moral dilemma.

Director Mendes handles these themes convincingly. He could be accused of an aloof, detached approach in the making of this film, but that is something that works in the context of Road To Perdition how close and loving can a cold-blooded killer be with his 12-year-old son?

As the relationship between man and boy develops, so we see a slow very slow thawing in Michael Sr's demeanour. Outer layers are stripped away and we see that he does have a heart after all.

Much has been made of Hanks being cast against type here and his role as a laconic, cold-hearted, even cruel assassin takes a bit of getting used to. But it is a convincing, if emotionally hollow performance. The same can be said for Newman, who remains a powerful presence on screen, and Law, as an odious press photographer who moonlights as a hit-man and who perhaps represents the purest form of evil in the entire film.

Road To Perdition arrives with a weight of expectation on its shoulders, with Mendes's debut, American Beauty, earning rave reviews and a clutch of Oscars a few years ago. This is a worthy follow up, with the English director having a stab at an American gangster movie the film is based on a successful graphic novel and giving us something that is both powerful and moving.

It is naturally violent the gunfire is sudden and loud, the blood in plentiful supply. And many of the images are familiar from gangster movies of yesteryear the hats, the suits, the Tommy guns, the cars. There is one extraordinary scene, played out in silence but for Thomas Newman's haunting score, in which the flashes from a lone gunman's weapon are glimpsed in the darkness as a group of men are mown down in a rain-battered street. It's a masterful moment that combines Mendes's vision with Hall's stunning camerawork.

To say the film is Oscar-worthy is to damn it with faint praise. It's good enough without having to worry about picking up prizes, but it will certainly win Oscars and one of them should go to Conrad L Hall.

Rating: 9 out of 10