Paul Schrader once again explores the spiritual dimension of an unlikely prospect: not this time a gigolo or a rock musician or a New York cabbie but a limo-riding drug trafficker who caters to an upscale clientele ("Twice the price, twice the safety"), offers them sympathetic counseling when indicated ("Personally I recommend Hazelton. It has the best all-around program"), keeps an introspective journal in the French style ("You drift from day to day. Years go by. Then a change comes"), and carries around with him, like a balloon on a string, a dark cloud of predestination. Willem Dafoe appears in every scene, so that it comes as a mild surprise when a narcotics cop steps in to remind him -- and us -- what a small fry he is. But then it's easy to lose our bearings in the pea-soup atmosphere of quiet meditation, high-art allusions, moody mood music (Springsteen imitations by Michael Been), and modish, coarse-grained cinematography. It's also easy to be inappropriately amused by all this -- or by some of it. At its best, the movie is ridiculous in the sense that Don Quixote or Buñuel's Simon of the Desert is ridiculous; at its worst it's just silly. Susan Sarandon, Dana Delany, Mary Beth Hurt. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd