Interestingly, Coppola has eschewed state-of-the-art special effects in favor of a panoply of archaic film-school tricks -- reversing the film, multiple exposures, playing with the shutter speed -- that give his Dracula a stylized, almost hyper-real clarity and a wonderfully singular weirdness.

Oldman and Ryder and Hopkins pant with eagerness. The movie is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.

Dracula has the nervy enthusiasm of the work of a precocious film student who has magically acquired a master's command of his craft. It's surprising, entertaining and always just a little too much.

It's sexy and bloody and, to my amazement, R-rated, but in a stylized, Grand Kabuki manner that lifts the action (including the sex and violence) from our normal sphere of reality to the realm of timeless, primal tales.

Coppola brings the old spook story alive -- well, undead -- as a luscious, infernal romance.