CRIME--family man.("Road to Perdition")

"Road to Perdition," starring Tom Hanks as a Depression-era hit man, is a solemnly beautiful art concept--perhaps the most thoroughly stylized gangster picture since the Coen brothers' "Miller's Crossing," from 1990. In that tale of baroque complication, the Coens included such oddball visual motifs as a fedora flying through the autumn woods. "Road to Perdition," which is directed by the talented Englishman Sam Mendes ("American Beauty"), is not as eccentric as "Crossing," but fedoras do matter in it, as do long dark coats, and the thick weave and bulk of men's suits from 1931. Rain matters, too, buckets of it--I haven't seen rain come down quite this strenuously since ...