Film Forum

U.S., 1992
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Based on Bram Stoker’s novel
Starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves
Approx. 128 min. 35mm.

“The film begins, as it should, with the tragic story of Vlad the Impaler, who went off to fight the Crusades and returned to find that his beloved wife, hearing he was dead, had killed herself. Coppola’s plot, from a screenplay by James V. Hart, exists precisely between London, where this modern age is just dawning, and Transylvania, which still sleeps unhealthily in the past. We meet a young attorney (Keanu Reeves) who has been asked to journey out to Dracula’s castle to arrange certain real estate transactions. Reeves’ carriage, driven by a man whose hands are claws, hurtles at the edges of precipices until he is finally discharged in the darkness to be met and taken to Dracula’s castle. There, everything is more or less as we expect it, only much more so. Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) waits here as he has for centuries for the return of his dead bride, and when he sees a photograph of Reeves’ fiancee, Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), he knows his wait has been rewarded at last. She lives again.” – Roger Ebert

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“A sumptuous engorgement of the senses.”
 – Kevin Maher, The Times (UK)

“Glistens with such dark, carbuncular magnificence and is fueled by such an elixir of sexual yearning that I defy any manjack among you to deny its murky tidal pull.”
 – Stephen Hunter, Baltimore Sun

“The movie seethes with visual genius and imagistic segues so brazenly hokey that to call them kitsch would utterly trivialize the hallucinatory onslaught. The naive bravado of it all ravishes sense and subtlety.”
 – Steve Erickson, L.A. Weekly

“Glorious and groundbreaking.”
 – Kevin Maher, The Times (UK)