THE last movie to do such a smart inside job on Hollywood's rotten core was Robert Altman's The Player and that was ten years ago.

Where Altman had a cast list of compliant celebrities in lead and cameo roles, Bernard Rose's thorny pricking of Tinseltown's decadence and spiritual black hole has only Peter Weller, from Robocop, and Timecode's Danny Huston as names that ring a bell (and not particularly loudly at that).

What's more, IvansXTC has been hanging around for UK release since 2000: not without irony for a movie written and directed by a Brit, who paints a deeply personal, less than lovely picture of the back-biting film world on that side of the Pond.

To Live And Die In Hollywood was its original subtitle, and only now does it have the chance over here to live rather than die.

Better late than never for Paperhouse director Rose's modern twist on Leo Tolstoy's study of mortality, The Death Of Ivan Illyich. Filming in rough-edged, fly-on-the-wall digital video, he adopts the Sunset Boulevard modus operandi of having a dead man tell his own tale in flashback on his too-late journey to redemption.

That beyond-the-grave tour guide is one Ivan Beckman, Hollywood's hottest agent, heading for hottest hell with a nose for signing up A-list talent and snorting coke in equal measure.

He has cancer, so does Hollywood, not a subtle metaphor, but a very effective one.

Updated: 08:52 Friday, September 20, 2002