REVIEWED - LORD OF WAR: A TIMELY companion piece to David Cronenberg's excellent A History of Violence, writer-director Andrew Niccol's Lord of War, his third feature after Gattaca and S1m0ne, is the first film that directly addresses the subject of international arms dealing.

It offers a thought-provoking and refreshingly original antidote to the hundreds of movies that have preceded it and actively celebrated gun culture.

The film's anti-hero, Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), is an utterly amoral operator born in the Ukraine and raised in the Little Odessa area of New York, where murder was an everyday part of life as he was growing up in the 1970s. Witnessing a shoot-out between rival Russian mobsters, Orlov spots an opening to fulfil a "basic human need": to supply arms, and to make millions from this trade.

In 1991, the end of the Soviet Union provides Orlov with "the best Christmas present ever" - previously unimaginable opportunities in the form of vast stockpiles of Cold War weapons now on the open market. A man devoid of scruples, he is prepared to sell arms to the highest bidder, even when that is a ruthless African dictator who casually shoots a soldier dead to test a gun and who calls his boy brigades "Khalashnikov kids".

Orlov's loquacious voiceover commentary is overwritten, just as his relationship with his wife (Bridget Moynahan) is underwritten, but these lapses do not detract significantly from a stylish, angry and alarming picture that confronts and exposes one of the greatest scandals in a modern world that obstinately refuses to learn the lessons of history.