Like any country with a war to live, Ireland has produced films that are not so much about the Troubles as amid them. Neil Jordan's first feature is a mood piece in which Ulster's bleak streets are contrasted with a neon-lit dreamland that develops into a nightmare. A saxophone player (Stephen Rea) is witness to the gangland-style murder of his manager and an innocent girl in front of the tawdry Dreamland Ballroom. Tracking down the mobsters, Danny eliminates them one by one, but with each murder his sanity becomes more precarious; the machine gun comes to replace the sax as his instrument. Chris Menges's cinematography uses the stillness of desolate backstreets in haunting tableaux, lending a note of non-action to a film that has the outline of a thriller. Jordan's vision is a hell-on-earth that evokes the American South of "Strange Fruit," streets where fires burn inexplicably. But it is Irish in character and characters, from winsome-lose-some Danny, to his victims who kill but cannot be left alone while dying. (JB)