Gary Oldman as Dracula

Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Francis Ford Coppola’s very horny vampire epic

Thirty years before Megalopolis, there was Coppola’s other deranged, maximalist fable about love lost, starring Gary Oldman as the terrifying Count

Andrew Fraser

Tuesday 19 November 2024

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux.

 Joker: Folie à Deux

Quentin Tarantino praises flop Joker sequel: ‘I really, really liked it’

Writer-director shows support for critically maligned and commercially disastrous musical follow-up to 2019 hit

Benjamin Lee

Tuesday 29 October 2024

 

Gary Oldman

Review

Bram Stoker’s Dracula review – Gary Oldman is Pierrot from hell in blood-red 90s take

This article is more than 2 years old

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 all-star retelling features an outstanding performance from Oldman as the tormented count

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 5 October 2024

Francis Ford Coppola’s vampire tale is now revived in cinemas for its 30th anniversary, with Gary Oldman the fierce and anguished count who hundreds of years ago renounced God and embraced an eternity of parasitic horror in his rage at the unjust death of his countess (played by Winona Ryder). Dressed like the Pierrot from hell in his vast Transylvanian castle, Dracula then buys property in Victorian London, and appears there in the style of a sinister young dandy, on the scent of a woman who looks exactly like his late wife: the winsome Mina (Ryder again), fiancee to the equally demure young lawyer who journeyed to Romania to draw up Dracula’s contracts: Jonathan, played by Keanu Reeves.

 

The 100 Best Screenwriters of All Time

As chosen by working screenwriters.

Edited by Stacey Wilson Hunt

“To make a good film,” Alfred Hitchcock once said, “you need three things: the script, the script, and the script.” Yet while it’s easy to find (and argue over) lists of the greatest films ever, it’s difficult to find a list of the greatest screenwriters. We decided to remedy that — by polling more than 40 of today’s top screenwriters on which of their predecessors (and contemporaries) they consider to be the best. To compile such a list is to pose a question: What is the essence of the screenwriter’s art? Plot? Dialogue? Character? All that and more? We left that judgment to those who know best — the writers. Here are their selections (ranked in order of popularity, with ties broken by us), and representative testimonials for each.

Apocalypse Now / Review by William Cadbury

Marlon Brando
Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now (1979) 

Review by William Cadbury

What does Apocalypse Now mean—the film as we have it, considering the minimal difference between the 35mm version with the title sequence and the 70mm version without, but ignoring all the pre-­release stories and versions, preliminary scripts, and encrusted commentary? Perhaps a guiding thread might be a question of comparison. Consider this description: We are taken into the soul of a strong leader of a semi-military, semi-familial band of peasant foreigners who are engaged in a project purported to be alien from the American national purpose, but which is entirely congruent with it, and we watch that finally empty soul passed on to its natural inheritor, a son worth of his inheritance but left virtually catatonic by it, bereft of its illusions of morality. The Godfather? Yes, but Apocalypse Now too, in many ways.

New York Stories / Review by Pauline Kael

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NEW YORK STORIES (1989): TWO-BASE HIT – Review by Pauline Kael

by Pauline Kael

As an artist in Martin Scorsese’s Life Lessons, the first part of the anthology film New York Stories, Nick Nolte is more bricklayer than aesthete, and that’s what’s great about him. After the artist’s girl tells him she’s leaving him, he gets into a rhythm as he spreads bright colors on a huge horizontal canvas, and you can see that he has the energy to breathe life into it. This isn’t a matter of physical size; it’s his conviction, his sureness. Scorsese is a skinny little guy, but he’s got this energy, too. And he uses Nolte’s Lionel Dobie for good-humored self-satire. Still, Nolte’s towering stockiness does help: he’s a wonderful sculptural object—a loping, gray-bearded beast spattered with paint. He pads up and down in front of the canvas moving his brushstrokes to rock and roll, played loud enough to drown out distractions. Do­bie works fast. Smiling, he’s dancing with his brushes, painting to the music. Scorsese knows that painting to rock is a cliche, but he also knows that it’s a good way for an Action painter to work. The music turned up high like that unifies Dobie’s impulses. His sensuality is all working together, exciting him, keeping him going.

The Conversation: No 12 best crime film of all time

Francis Ford Coppola, 1974

John Patterson
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.44 BST

T

he finest of the four great paranoia thrillers of the 70s – alongside The Parallax View, All the President's Men (both from director Alan J Pakula), and Sidney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor – The Conversation drew attention because it was Coppola's first movie after his hugely successful The Godfather, but also because it dealt, quite coincidentally, as it happened – with wiretapping and surveillance at exactly the moment the Watergate crisis was reaching its climax.

Not that Coppola was making a movie about Nixon; he was reflecting – in the movie's fatefully ambiguous phrase "he'll kill us if he gets the chance" – on the critical response to The Godfather's perceived amorality. He wanted to show there are two ways of seeing everything (and one of them may prove fatal). Gene Hackman's bug-man Harry Caul is a guilt-ridden, sex-phobic Catholic haunted by the murder of two former targets and determined to prevent another killing. But in this universe of dislocation and paranoia, made up of half-heard sound fragments and deconstructed images, nothing is as it seems.

THE GUARDIAN

Chinatown / The best crime film of all time

Touch of Evil / No 2 best crime film of all time

Vertigo / No 3 best crime film of all time

Badlands / No 4 best crime film of all time

Rashomon / No 5 best crime film of all time

Double Indemnity / No 6 best crime film of all time

Get Carter / No 7 best crime film of all time

Pulp Fiction / No 8 best crime film of all time

Hidden / No 9 best crime film of all time

Goodfellas / No 10 best crime film of all time

Bonnie and Clyde / No 11 best crime film of all time

The Conversation / No 12 best crime film of all time

Vanessa Frankestein / Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra

Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra

by Vanessa Frankestein

Inspire me will be a new category on my blog where I can talk about people, movies, music, etc. that keep inspiring me. I think this is very exciting because I get inspired by SO many things every day of my life. The way I dress or the way I do my hair is a result of so many influences which are worth to be named here. There is no ranking or something like that. I’m just going to talk about issues that come to my mind.

Sadie Frost as Lucy with Winona Ryder as Mina Harker

 This time, it’s Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker's Dracula from 1992. 

Let’s just start by saying that I love Bram Stoker’s novel. It’s actually one of my favorite novels of all time. Coppola’s movie is my favorite adaption of the novel because unlike all the others it really tells (well more or less) what the novel is about. 

Sadie Frost and Coppola

 Gary Oldman is rad as the monstrous Count Dracula. I love his hairstyle in the beginning of the movie. Moreover Coppola’s Dracula is full of amazing costumes, for example Draculas red armour and all dresses worn by Lucy and Mina. 

Well despite Oldman’s fantastic performance my favorite character has to be Lucy Westenra. She is the red-headed seductive siren. Coppola eroticized her much further than her literary incarnation but you know… Read between the lines of the novel and you know what Coppola is talking about. 

 

 

I love everything about Lucy. She is not only beautiful but also a very interesting character. The way she drives all men mad with her naughty attitude is just hilarious. 

I always loved the scene (since I was a little teenage girl) in which Lucy sleepwalks in the garden in her amazing red nightgown. I found it on YouTube and though the quality is horrible one can still see how fantastic this scene is. 

But let’s not forget her last scene when she is already transformed into a vampire and is wearing this incredible wedding gown. How can someone not fall in love with her? I mean, honestly. 

Sadie Frost will definitely be my favorite Lucy until the end of time.  Are you a Dracula fan, too?

Fangirling in my Lucy Shirt by Creep Street

Vanessa Frankestein

VANESSA FRANKESTEIN

BIOGRAPHY OF VANESSA FRANKESTEIN