I can't remember the last time I saw a film with such graphic scenes of throat cutting - and I've seen a lot of films. Similarly, I can't remember the last time I saw a fight scene where the central protagonist is stark naked either.

Director David Cronenberg isn't one to shy away from sex or graphic violence (I will admit to being a huge fan - see my earlier post for a bit of mindless hero worship), and like his previous film, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises contains at least three quite startling scenes of bloodletting which made the audience in my local cinema gasp quite audibly.

However, Eastern Promises is not a gratuitously violent film at all - rather, it's an intelligent, thoughtfully crafted piece of cinema, with some quite remarkable performances from Viggo Mortensen and the less well known Vincent Cassell (La Haine).

Naomi Watts plays Anna, a London midwife who finds herself unwittingly drawn into the murky, violent world of the Russian Mafia. Her attempts to find a recently orphaned baby's next of kin bring her into contact with the wolfish patriarch Semyon (played with incredible depth and charisma by Armin Meuhler Stahl), his brattish, sociopathic son Kirill (Cassell) and most fatefully of all, the taciturn Nikolai (Mortensen).

To say any more about the plot would give too much away, suffice to say that the performances are uniformly convincing to the point that you forget the actors aren't actually Russian. Cronenberg paces the film in a very deliberate way that creates a thoroughly believable world for the characters; and when the scenes of violence appear they are realistic, brutal and pack a genuine emotional punch.

At least one of the actors in this movie deserves an oscar (Mortensen, Cassell and Stahl are all equally good in my opinion), just as Jeremy Irons deserved one for Dead Ringers and Ralph Feinnes deserved one for Spider; but this being a Cronenberg movie, and not a Hollywood studio picture, they probably won't get one.

This is easily as good as A History of Violence, and probably one of the best films I've seen this year. While some may bemoan Cronenberg's departure from his own 'Body Horror' genre of old, I for one don't see the difference - his films still go straight for the jugular.