The General

It is a crime that Brendan Gleeson (best known as Mel Gibson's fearless sidekick in Braveheart) was not nominated for his brilliant performance in John Boorman's Cannes Film Festival award-winning bio-pic. He was robbed, which is somehow fitting, as the film's subject is Martin Cahill, Dublin's most notorious criminal, who was assassinated in 1994 by the IRA. Cahill was something of a folk hero, who bedeviled the police, the courts and the press (with his habit of covering his face with his hands). A pit bull of a man, he was also an undeniably charismatic and colorful figure. In one scene, Cahill nails a cohort's hand to a pool table to extract a confession, and then accompanies the poor chap to the hospital; and his own wife shares him with her sister (he had children by both). Jon Voight, who starred in Boorman's Deliverance, co-stars as Martin's long-frustrated nemesis, inspector Ned Kenny, who cannot bring him down. The film even includes a reference to Boorman's own reputed brush with Cahill, who supposedly broke into Boorman's home and stole the gold record the director received for Deliverance's hit song "Dueling Banjos." One of the year's best and highly recommended. (K. Lee Benson)