Under the titles of this, John Dahl's third feature, we are introduced to New York marrieds, the diamond-hard bitch Bridget (Linda Fiorentino), and her ineffectual intern husband Clay (Bill Pullman), who she has just coerced into selling a caseful of pharmaceutical drugs. When Clay turns and hits her though, Bridget takes the money and runs for Chicago, but decides to hole-up in a small town part-way until she can get a divorce through her scheming lawyer (an excellent J.T. Walsh).

In a bar she picks up small-town wannabe Mike (Peter Berg) for energetic sex, and when Clay sets a black private detective (Bill Nunn) on her trail, Bridget sucks Mike into her schemes be to free of Clay and free to return to New York.

If Dahl's first feature - the wholly unremarkable (and oddly distributed) Kill Me Again - failed to prepare us for the second - the quick-witted, inventive Red Rock West - then neither signals the advance in his cinematic art evidenced here. It's his first film from someone else's screenplay, and is superbly served with one of the brightest, sharpest scripts (by Steve Barancik) landed on an American thriller in a while.

Given endlessly quotable lines to saviour, Fiorentino is in her foul-mouthed element. (The bar-room pick-up between her and Berg is a delight). Her character is wholly cynical and self-serving from top to bottom, and Barancik allows her to remain that way for whole 110 minute ride. Her sob stories and manipulations of the male psyche are a joy to behold, turning what could have been a easy movie freak into one of cinema's most cherishable monsters for several years.

In her wake, the reliable Pullman and pretty boy Berg are perfectly cast, allowing Bridget's domination to be entirely credible without ever once tilting the scales towards the ridiculous. It is noticeable that it's Berg's Mike who takes the traditional female role and winds up asking if there's ever to be more to their relationship than shallow and meaningless sex.

Militating against the picture to a degree, there are slightly too many of Bridget's unusual and energetic sex scenes early on, so that, like most contemporary noir, the film is a good five to ten minutes too long. But all is forgiven once the gears of Bridget's scheme begin to grind in earnest in the second half. Added to which, Barancik deserves to be heaped with praise for supplying an ending (recalling Lawrence Kasdan's splendid Body Heat) that bucks the Hollywood system and is both wholly in-keeping with the bulk of the picture, and deeply satisfying at the same time. Joseph Vitarelli's first rate low-key cool jazz score is at least two notches above the merely adequate.

Three pictures into a career then and Dahl has produced his first genuinely indispensable work, and one that thankfully eschews the bland smoke and neon 'style' that sinks too many contemporary thriller. Very possibly (as he himself is the first to recognise) his range doesn't extend all that far from making film noir for the 90s, but when the film noir he's making is this good, no one is going to be raising too many objections.