Great flick by Neil Jordan...

Rating: Null/10 (25 October 2002)

Too bad he only has a handful of his movies that are even close to this caliber of direction.
Very gothic, very dark. Cruise is exceptional. Pitt excels in his follow-up performance to Legends of the Fall.
This movie has a fantastic soundtrack that compliments the film very well. It is the same story as Anne Rice's first Vampire Chronicle title, and luckily she was still alive to write the screenplay. She did change it up significantly for the movie, and I think it flows a lot better than her novels...which I regard as the Danielle Steele of vampire romance. If you're into the factual basis of any of this and are expecting it to give a true depiction of vampirism, then this isn't for you. Yet another romantic glorification, without any concrete explanation for anything. She gets into those aspects a bit more in her books, but they are still just romantic notions. If you can ignore this fallacy, then the movie is wonderful.
Pitt and Cruise play their roles extremely well, as does Antonio Banderas and Kirsten Dunst. This movie is one you can watch over and over again...unlike Queen of the Damned, which I deleted from my hard drive 6 minutes into the movie (I download and preview movies before I purchase them, rent them, or see them in the theatre...very useful with the quality of movies Hollywood has been presenting to the public).

The only thing I like about Anne Rice is her characters and her ability to tell a tale...when she wasn't involved in Queen of the Damned, I was skeptical. And rightly so, it's probably the worst movie attempt to mix The Crow and Blade together, soundtrack included. I would say it's on par with The Crow 2/3/4 and however many more they churn out before someone puts a stop to the mockery.
VHS or DVD, this movie is great. Not enough to warrant the DVD scenery-wise, but definitely for the sound quality.