The number of films where radical Canuck director David Cronenberg appears in front of the cameras is a select one. The number that are actually any good is great deal shorter. His role in this latest from the maverick Gus Van Sant is small but significantly more than just a head-up-and-grin cameo.

On this evidence what Cronenberg and Van Sant have in common - notable back catalogues aside - is an instinctive understanding of the fundamental unreality that the mass media in general - and television in particular - is siphoning into the everyday. From the former's Videodrome: "Television is reality, and reality is less than television."

Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) would not understand the distinction, that there even was a distinction. She exists for television. "On TV is where we learn who we really are," she says. She may only be the weather girl on the local cable channel in Little Hope, New Hampshire, but it is television, and all television is good. She has also just had her husband Larry murdered.

Buck Henry's fine script portions Suzanne's tale up into media-friendly chunks. She addresses us straight to camera to explain, maybe even excuse herself; there are interviews with those that knew her; voiceovers; talk shows. To Die For is a media overload from which we learn that Larry, at the prompting of his family, was eager to start a family and, her career threatened, Suzanne determined to defend herself by the only means at her disposal: she lured a trio of local high schoolers into shooting him. "It was the most exciting time of my life," one of them later says.

If we needed confirmation, Van Sant's film proves once and for all that Mrs. Tom Cruise is a formidable screen actress. Suzanne is, if you will, a highly selective bimbo. If it doesn't further her career she can phase it out of her orbit like it simply no longer exists. She is relentlessly dim to everything that isn't either in front of a camera or about getting in front of a camera. She needs a husband, she gets one. She needs him disposed of, she will do whatever is necessary. Her manipulation of the youths is cruel and glacial, and provides some of the best moments in the film.

Joaquin Phoenix, brother of the late River, is excellent as Jimmy, the boy Suzanne literally seduces into murder, and Alison Folland even better as the overweight, monumentally insecure Lydia. Matt Dillion, star of Van Sant's terrific Drugstore Cowboy, is unusually sympathetic as Larry.

Coming off the back of the calamitous Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Van Sant badly needed a hit. He found one in this knowing black comedy. His tone is a little uneasy for the first third or so, the film slightly bitty. It's not until Suzanne kickstarts her game plan that her director seems entirely comfortable, going on to serve up a second half that is particularly delicious. The more she is convinced that TV is enriching her as a person - that the studio lights are revealing an inner star - the more facile and meaningless Suzanne becomes - in complete contrast to this funny, bitter, bitingly intelligent little film.