VIDEO: FORGET Ally McBeal, if you want a sassy legal babe who doesn't look in need of a decent meal look no further than Erin Brockovich (15).

Julia Roberts is magnificently feisty as the single mum driven by ambition, pride and a sense of injustice to finding herself a role in society that isn't just about being a mum.

She talks her way into a job as a legal clerk for lawyer Albert Finney and, not content with shuffling pieces of paper, begins an amateur investigation into what appears to be a routine house sale.

But before she can begin to establish herself she must first confront the prejudices of her co-workers who have dismiss her as a bimbo. Her cause isn't helped by her insistence on wearing short skirts

Her persistence uncovers a fuel corporation's attempts to hush up pollution of a small town's water supply, which has had fatal consequences for its unknowing occupants.

Roberts uses a combination of sex appeal, charm, deception and naked aggression to browbeat her boss into taking up the residents' case and then hunt down the missing evidence that will link the corporation to the pollution.

The film is as much about the main character's tangled homelife and her refusal to accept her lot in life as it is her championing the cause of the families affected by the pollution.

This is easily Robert's best film performance. She played a brilliant legal student in The Pelican Brief but was about as believable as Dudley Moore playing Conan the Barbarian. Here she perfectly captures her fiery temperament and the obsessive way she chases her goal.

The story is a true one and the real Erin Brockovich makes an appearance in an early scene as a waitress.

Gary Lawrence