Here Bill Paxton plays the nice, conservative, dough-strapped family man who finds the snow-covered wreckage of a plane containing $4.5 million in cash. With his brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and his brother's lunkhead buddy (Brent Briscoe) in tow, he hits upon a simple plan to keep the cash. But money is never simple. In Smith's cunning morality play, you're suckered into siding with the protagonist, who starts out doing the right thing, then the only thing, then some very bad things. That each new twist makes keen psychological sense only adds to the infernal tension.

The wacky exuberance of director Raimi's Evil Dead movies is nowhere in evidence, but the spare, pitiless style he displays here is ideally suited to the material. His filmmaking has the lean tautness you associate with killer B-movies: no wasted shots, just forward motion--not to mention the most expressive use of icy devastation since Fargo. Against all that blank white snow, every color leaves a stain like sin.