WHEN Jessica Lange won the Best Actress Oscar for Blue Sky in 1992, Tony Richardson's bleak marital melodrama had yet to open in Britain. Once it did, no-one noticed, and Lange's performance is long forgotten.

A decade later, similar circumstances surround the UK release of Monster's Ball, but the outcome will differ. Halle Berry's histrionic Oscar speech and her status as the first black actress to win the Academy Award have ensured saturation coverage, and her fearless, burning performance in, ironically, another bleak melodrama wholly justifies the golden gong.

Love, death, racism, redemption and a search for a sense of place in the world - the themes of American Beauty too - form the cornerstones of this grown-up, uncompromising, brutally sad study of family, personal and impersonal relationships.

Initially, Marc Forster's intense, intimate and intelligent drama occupies the confined territory of The Green Mile and Dead Man Walking. The focus is on three generations of a family of prison correction officers in the Deep South: retired, still racist Buck (Peter Boyle), the patriarchal grouch; his emotionally numbed and widowed son Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), the bulimic head of the death squad; and his son Sonny (Heath Ledger), with whom he shares the local whore. Young Sonny, dousing himself in whisky, is struggling with the family burden of expectation and the grim demands of the job.

On Death Row for 11 years and about to partake in the Monster's Ball - the last meal and smoke for the condemned man - is Musgrove (Sean 'P.Diddy' Combs), whose wife Leticia (Berry) must bring up their obese child on her own.

When tragedy strikes for both Hank and Leticia, they are slowly united by shared circumstance, loneliness, self-loathing, despair and need as much as chance, leading to the most believable sex, scenes in an American movie in years. From death and loss, and the stretch marks of bitter life, love and blind hope grow in the most extreme circumstances.

Berry, previously wasted in the likes of The Flintstones and the boob-flashing nonsense of Swordfish, graduates to the A list with her honest, carnal performance while Thornton is superb in portraying Hank's muddled mass of contradictions, kind but cruel, hard but soft, drifting yet determined. No wonder, Hank likes to indulge in late-night chocolate ice cream only to throw it up later.

Updated: 10:00 Friday, June 07, 2002