A misnomer. Bram Stoker's Dracula, as we all are aware, is a book, and the film called Bram Stoker's Dracula does not concern itself with a man called Bram Stoker and his relationship to a book called Dracula. This is Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and no mistake. (Yes, it claims fidelity to the original novel, but no film in which Dracula is the main character has a right to do that.) The director's visual style -- or, since his "style" is not something consistent and identifiable but something that varies wildly from film to film if not scene to scene, better say his visual intention or visual inclination or visual ambition -- is the equivalent of the old funnel-in-the-mouth method of torture: the inundating, overwhelming, overgorging, overflowing rush of spectacle that sooner or later compels you to want to lie down and digest for a while in peace and quiet. And what's lost in the rush is the storyline and drama, the broader meaning and moral framework. The drumming emphasis on ostentatious and vulgar spectacle traps the movie on the surface. The busy, the preoccupying, the bewildering surface. Every vampire movie has a mythic underlayer; not every vampire movie has a staircase of access to it. Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Anthony Hopkins. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd