A point conveniently forgotten when Roberto Benigni joyfully conquered the Hollywood mafia at this year's Oscars is that the actor's ability to win over the most resistant audiences had been played on movie screens over a decade before. In Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law (1986), Benigni played the third of a trio of loser criminals, an outrageously demonstrative Italian who somehow charm-bombed the broken-nosed loser oiks he's imprisoned with.

It's both a testament to Jarmusch's eclecticism (his work rings with echoes of echoes of everything from Bresson and Mizoguchi to his beloved Nicholas Ray), but perhaps more importantly, it's evidence of a refreshing attitude to casting. Jarmusch is at ease with the stellar and the minor, the American and the unAmerican.

"America's a kind of a throwaway culture that's made of this mixture of different cultures," he told Rolling Stone in 1986. "To make a film about America, it seems to me logical to have at least one perspective that's transplanted here from some other culture, because ours is a collection of transplanted influences."

Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai marks perhaps the most extreme manifestation of that so far. Like the surreal Dead Man - an intellectual western that wasn't a western - Ghost Dog jumbles up the international codes of this former film student's wide film knowledge, creating a spiritual gangster movie that isn't a gangster movie.

Forest Whitaker - not an obvious choice, but Jarmusch knows what he's doing - plays Ghost Dog, a professional hitman who strikes with the stealth of a ninja warrior. Ghost Dog leads a drifting existence, living in a ramshackle shed on the roof of an abandoned building and taking occasional contracts from a strange mafiosa family. He works strictly in accordance with his ethical codes, but when his paymasters cross him, Ghost Dog is forced to take action in the only way his codes will allow him.

From any other director this would be a platform for sub-Tarantino Pulp Philosophy, but the pairing of Jarmusch's elegant staging and longtime collaborator Robby Muller's terrific cinematography can be a stunning combination.

Again, music plays a vital role in the proceedings ("Music," Jarmusch says, "is the best medicine for everything"). A sometime director of music videos (Talking Heads, Neil Young), Jarmusch has a great ear for sound, whether it's Screamin' Jay Hawkins' stuttering R&B classic I Put A Spell On You (Stranger Than Paradise) or John Lurie's brooding original score for Mystery Train.

Here - unusually for Jarmusch, who briefly became synonymous with Neil Young in the wake of his Year Of The Horse rockumentary - the music takes on a modern street swing, with contributions from rapper RZA of New York hip-hop collective the Wu-Tang Clan.

Ghost Dog marks something of a departure for Whitaker too. The actor has more recently become more accustomed to roles in such mainstream films as Phenomenon, which launched a bizarre genre best described as romantic tragedy, and sci-fi monster maniac movie Species.

He recently followed his peer group in making the switch to directing with the actress-led relationship drama Waiting To Exhale, starring Angela Bassett and Whitney Houston, which he followed with the similarly romantic Hope Floats. If Whitaker seems an odd choice for Jarmusch material, however, it's worth remembering that Whitaker came to everyone's attention for his performance as Jody, the British soldier in Neil Jordan's 1992 Oscar-winning film The Crying Game.

Rest assured that Jarmusch won't follow Whitaker's example and cross over the other way. "Independent film-making is a lot like gambling," he once said. "I could make a lot more money by taking (Hollywood) directing jobs, or giving away control of my films and selling to the highest bidder. But if I'm putting up three years of my life and a lot of work, and you put up the money, we can split the profits - but I keep the negative." Damon Wise