In a switch from what we have come to expect from his portrayals of usually moral and upright characters, Tom Hanks plays the more sinister Michael Sullivan in Road to Perdition, the new film from Sam Mendes, director of the Oscar-winning American Beauty.

The story is set in America’s Midwest during the Depression. Sullivan – a hit man for an Irish gang - is known as the “Angel of Death”, but (and this may be more like the Tom we know) he is also a devoted family man. Paul Newman stars as John Looney, the man he works for who has brought up the fatherless Sullivan like his own son. Jude Law plays another hit man known as “The Reporter”.