It must have sounded like a promotional piece of cake: the director of Rosemary's Baby returning to the diocese of devil worship. But no one could accuse Roman Polanski of crass capitalization, much less crass capitalism. This is not an End of Days. It is an anti-End of Days, almost (if you will) a Return to the Good Old Days, holding special effects at bay -- insofar as is still humanly possible -- and following the flatfooted course of a classical detective story. And in some ways it is even better than a return to the old days, because it demands from its director a greater force of personality -- a greater force of perversity -- to make it in this manner today, and because, too, the director's style is now more mature and self-assured, with a relaxing of all that fish-eye bulging and warping of Rosemary's Baby. Polanski, schooled among the ancients, or in other words before the advent of the Steadicam and the Computer-Generated Image, is a consummate craftsman, with a thoroughgoing attention to color, music (the esteemed concert-hall composer, besides film composer, Wojciech Kilar), mood, flow, the felicitous touch, the telling detail, the oblique angle, the overall design. Anyone who shares his taste for such niceties will feel well fed for most of the way. Maybe the absence of a figure of virtue is a serious void in the movie: what good is Evil without Good? And maybe the supernatural prowess of the athletic-shoed Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski's wife) is glimpsed too soon. But the larger defect is that the weakness of the detective-hero (Johnny Depp, whose glasses-and-goatee disguise only accentuates his superficiality), or more exactly the weakness of his purpose and motivation, becomes a weakness in the movie itself the longer it goes on. And at two and a quarter hours, it goes on much too long. At that length, the ending (after overshooting the perfectly satisfactory ending of the original novel, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's El Club Dumas) is a bit of a fizzle. With Frank Langella, Lena Olin. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd