AMERICAN BUFFALO (64)

Directed by: Michael Corrente (from the play by David Mamet)

Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Franz, Sean Nelson

The Pitch: Two small-time crooks plan an inevitably doomed robbery.

Theo Sez: A night at the theatre, but the actors strike sparks and the play crackles with hypnotic (if occasionally exasperating) energy. Mamet's stylised patois has never been more undiluted onscreen - it's an hour and a half of watching three characters repeat themselves, talk in fragments, double back and start over, all the while speaking in a pungent mix of four-letter words and incongruously formalised, near-Runyonesque language ("That may well be so", "I am not averse to this"). It gets a bit too much at times, not least because Hoffman (who gets most of the speeches) is too showy for the material - this kind of garrulous tough-guy talk needs the deadpan archness that Joe Mantegna brings it, or that Pacino brought to GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (it's a self-conscious quality, an implicit recognition that small-time crooks don't really talk like that). Still powerful, playing like the missing link between DEATH OF A SALESMAN and RESERVOIR DOGS ; loads of texture, even if the goings-on are sometimes obscure.