Events unfold in beautifully sustained flashback, as the nervy, crippled 'Verbal' Kint (a tremendous Kevin Spacey) explains to pushy, self-confident federal agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) how 27 men showed up dead in San Pedro harbour after a multi-million dollar drug heist went disastrously wrong. Weeks earlier Kint and four of New York's finest criminal minds were hauled in on a police line-up. Recognising a put-up, the five decide to pull a job exposing "New York's Finest Taxi Service" and net a fistful of smuggled emeralds before taking off Los Angeles to fence the ill-gotten gains, and reluctantly decide to stay together. Kujan is convinced ex-cop Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) is the gang's mastermind, but Kint assures him that a legendary, maybe even mythical, Hungarian gangster called Keyer Soze was pulling all their strings. Slowly but surely the bodies start falling mesmerisingly out of the closet as the full truth of the nocturnal explosion and the identity of Soze are revealed.

Comparisons with the boy Tarantino are perhaps inevitable, but Suspects is less theatrical than Reservoir Dogs, less smug than Pulp Fiction, and considerably less self-conscious and far darker than either. The firecracker script owes debts of a more integral kind to the legacy of noir ("Round up the usual suspects," Claude Rains says in Casablanca). It harks back to a picture like Huston's The Maltese Falcon in its tortuous, labyrinthine plotting. And unlike what Tarantino might do with such material, McQuarrie wastes nothing. His dialogue is sharp and funny - "Fucko!" - with not a spare word for hamburgers or Madonna. The plot doesn't so much ask as demand attention. McQuarrie is confident enough to wait until it's half over to really introduce Mr. Big, but by the end has his audience - like Kujan - slavering to know.

The ensemble playing is flawless. Spacey, Byrne, Kevin Pollack, Stephen Baldwin (who might just prove to be the saviour of the famous acting clan), and Benico Del Torro slide together like well-oiled gun parts. The splendid Pete Postlethwaite sports the most bizarre of accents as Soze's sinister lawyer Mr. Koybayashi, and Palminteri is as compulsively watchable as ever - with a third home-run in as many pictures, this remarkable performer looks to be unstoppable. The support elicits some strong playing from usual suspects like Giancarlo Esposito, Dan Hedaya and Paul Bartel.

Newton Thomas Sigel's widescreen photography is confident enough to know when to turn off the style, and the sickeningly gifted John Ottman not only edits sharply but scores the picture in bold, confident strokes. But most of all, The Usual Suspects does things we don't expect (evidence the extraordinary flashback to Soze's past), and even the potentially clever-clever resolution makes you want to applaud. Challenging and manipulative, Singer and McQuarrie have fashioned a piece of riveting cinema.