The first feature-length film of music-video veteran Mary Lambert, but only by grace of her earlier dismissal -- for "artistic differences," one supposes -- from Prince's Under the Cherry Moon. If nothing else, this movie will stand as a monument to Prince's artistic good sense. There is surely very little else. A woman (poor, plucky Ellen Barkin, willing to give her all, and to show her all, in a most unworthy cause) wakes up at the end of an airport runway somewhere in Spain, with cuts and bruises on her body, and a spot of blood on her scarlet dress: "I remember coming here," says a voice inside her head, "and I don't remember anything else." Unfortunately, while fingering her bruises, she begins to remember it all -- in bits and pieces, in the démodé tradition of non-linear storytelling and nonsequential editing, and in the far-receding footprints and overarching shadows of men like Alain Resnais and Nicolas Roeg. It's a curious metamorphosis whereby the music-video sensibility, when stretched to fifteen or twenty times the normal length, stops looking like a blue-jeans or soft-drink commercial and starts looking like a bona fide art movie. But there it is. And few moviegoing experiences are as savorless as the art movie without art. Gabriel Byrne, Jodie Foster, Julian Sands, Martin Sheen. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd