Even at his least focused (Girl 6, anyone?) Spike Lee is incapable of making a dull or unengaging film, and the ambitiously sprawling 25th Hour, in spite of an unfortunate excess of portentous ‘New York post-9/11’ imagery, is absorbing enough to qualify as near mandatory viewing.

Ed Norton, in typically super-intense mode, plays a drug dealer about to serve a seven-year sentence for trafficking offences, and The 25th Hour accompanies him on his final 24 hours, in the course of which he broods on whether his girlfriend (Rosario Dawson) has given him up, and says his various farewells to friends, family and the city itself. Battlefield Earth refugee Barry Pepper, having somehow survived the wreckage to bag another role, emerges with dignity almost restored after an entirely adequate performance as an obnoxious Wall Street-type pal of Norton’s whose sympathy is in finite supply, while the shadowy Russian mobster crew he’s involved with wonder if their cover will be blown...

Meanwhile, Philip Seymour-Hoffman essays yet another deeply unappealing, obese blob along the lines of his Happiness character: this time, he’s a sardonic university lecturer who finds himself subject to sexual advances from a student (Paquin) who wants an ‘A’ grade. (When Paquin turns fifty, will she still have cornered the cinematic market in seventeen-year-old jailbait slappers?)

The Seymour-Hoffman/Paquin exchanges border on the uncomfortable, but Lee handles them astutely enough, and Norton’s tornado of a central performance won’t be easily forgotten. Visually arresting in the extreme, with mild echoes of Taxi Driver in its anti-hero’s repelled obsession with New York,The 25th Hour’s strengths are enough to overcome the suspicion that there’s less to it than meets the eye.