STARRING Brendan Gleeson, Adrian Dunbar, Jon Voight
DIRECTED BY John Boorman
Before he was killed in 1994, Dublin crime boss Martin Cahill garnered a reputation for possessing both a murderer's pathology and a movie star's charisma. Gleeson (I Went Down) originally had concerns about playing Cahill, because he ''didn't want to romanticize someone whose victims were still hobbling around.'' but Boorman (Deliverance, Hope and Glory), who won this year's best director prize at Cannes, feels the movie plays the character both ways. ''He comes from a long line of Irish tradition beginning with the Celts,'' says Boorman, ''rebels who put themselves against society and are always kind of admired, even when they do these awful things. He's a folk hero. Or a folk villain.'' (Dec. 18)
THE LOWDOWN Advance word's great, but The General will need all the raves it can get in order to overcome Cahill's no-name status in the States.
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