ABC. Always Be Closing. First prize is a Cadillac, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you're fired. There's a recession out there and times are tight for a non-too honest Chicago real estate office where there are four salesmen and three of them are on the ropes. Then someone steals the leads that could save their bacon.

David Mamet is one of America's finest dramatists, his work among some of the most complex and moral challenging on offer in theatre and latterly in film, both with scripts (The Untouchables, The Verdict), and in his self-directed work (Things Change, Homicide, and the startling debut House of Games). Glengarry Glen Ross was penned in 1984 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, but has taken eight years to make it to the screen itself, coming up against the thorny problem of just how to translate this essentially unrealistic, highly mannered theatrical piece to film. Director James Foley solves this with ease - he doesn't try. The result - scripted by the playwright himself - undergoes a little opening out, but in essence remains ninety percent rooted to the real estate office itself.

The result is the focus of the piece being essentially shifted towards the writing and the playing, leaving Foley to assemble a top-notch cast drawn from the great and good of Hollywood to bring such a static work to life. Al Pacino leads with a strength that allows him to be off screen for much of the first act and yet still dominate as the hot shot, carnivorous salesman Ricky Roma; he has seldom been better in recent years. Roma is the modern incarnation of Sheldon 'The Machine' Levine (Jack Lemmon), the once hot, now withering star played alternately nervy, beaten-down and boastfully assured by the veteran actor who netted Best Actor at the Venice Festival and must surely be in the running come Oscar time for his tour de force portrait of a man on the ropes but who refuses to admit it. These are backed by a remaining almost exclusively male cast all in top gear; Alan Arkin and one of the most consistent screen actors of his generation, Ed Harris, are the remaining salesmen desperate to land that big sting to bring them on-board, and Britain's Jonathan Pryce is the sweaty, anxious mark Pacino's Roma lands but who wants out.

Although slightly muted and adjusted for the screen (the addition of Alec Baldwin's odious head-office trouble shooter for one) the piece fair crackles with Mamet's precise, repetitive and terrifyingly frank dialogue that strips the layers from this caustic examination of the dubious joys of capitalism and the American Dream in extremis. The lines are swear-spattered almost to point of mantra, while Foley moves his camera sparingly about the players, or employs lightening cuts to hammer home the script's precision and economy.

While it remains essentially uncinematic, Foley - who found his feet with the Jim Thompson adaptation After Dark, My Sweet after some flashy, lack-lustre past work - manages to move things sufficiently to keep from going stale and still give the frame over to his hand-picked cast to run with such A-grade material, and they don't let him down. Repulsive, fascinating and most of all, compulsive viewing.