The LFF closed last night with American Beauty, the much-garlanded movie debut of the young British stage director Sam Mendes. It is a witty and confident transcription of the surface of bourgeois American life, and a glimpse of the disorientation, self-doubt and strange erotic longing that lies beneath - the moment, to paraphrase Nabokov, when a confused America sweeps the refrigerator and defrosts the driveway.

Kevin Spacey gives a terrifically funny performance as Lester Burnham, the cynical fortysomething who hates his job, hates his life, hates himself, enlivening this dire existence with wry voice-over commentary. His next-door neighbours one side are two spruce gay guys, and on the other, a retired colonel in the Marine Corps with a buzzard face, weird son and wife who is catatonic with unhappiness.

Annette Bening plays Lester's own wife Carolyn: madly uptight with a failing real estate business and a face permanently stressed. His daughter Jane's distaste for Lester escalates into hysterical disgust when she realises he is consumed with desire for her blonde, sexy friend Angela (Mena Suvari) - and she fancies him right back.

This is a movie which shimmers with self-possession and with the curious frisson it is possible to derive from the moonscape of prosperous, suburban America. Part of the pleasure is the range of first-class actors. Mendes has also benefitted from the experience of a brilliant director of photography, Conrad L Hall, who fashions some stunning images and tableaux.

The finished movie is arguably wound up a little too tight, and may not entirely deliver the deeply unsettling dénouement that Alan Ball's screenplay appears to promise. But it is undoubtedly a brilliantly original and distinctive work from Mendes, for whom an Academy Award nomination would be only fair.