Bram Stoker's Dracula

Year:  1992
Director:  Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay:  James V. Hart, based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker
Starring:  Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Anthony Hopkins, Richard E. Grant, Sadie Frost, Tom Waits
Running Time:  128 minutes
Genre:  Horror

In 1462, the Transylvanian knight, Vlad Dracula (Oldman) returns from a victory against the invading Turks, only to find that his wife has killed herself after receiving a false report of his death.  Enraged at the idea that her soul is now damned because she committed suicide, Dracula renounces God and the church and swears that he will return from his own death to avenge hers.
In 1897, English solicitor Jonathan Harker (Reeves) travels to Transylvania to negotiate the sale of some property in London to the mysterious Count Dracula (Oldman).  As Harker becomes increasingly disturbed by his strange, Dracula becomes convinced that Harker's fiance, Mina Murray (Ryder) is the reincarnation of his dead wife.
Escaping to Britain, Dracula sets about preying on Mina's best friend, Lucy Westenra (Frost).  It becomes apparent that only the eccentric Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Hopkins) has the knowledge to fight Dracula's reign of terror.

This, the umpteenth screen adaptation of the evergreen horror classic, feels closer to Anne Rice than Bram Stoker in it's sensuous, romantic portrayal of the vampire.  Everything about the film is extremely stylised, showcasing  a range of cinematic tricks, the problem with this approach is that it constantly reminds you that your watching a movie, it's too pretty to ever be involving or, crucially, really scary.
Keanu Reeves is certainly miscast as an English solicitor (his attempt at an English accent is notoriously dreadful), Winona Ryder also struggles with the English accent, but does do well with a fairly thankless role .  Gary Oldman makes a striking, if never really scary Dracula (who appears variously as a grotesque old man, a wolf man monster, a man bat monster and a romantic knight), while a scenery-chewing Anthony Hopkins ladles on steaming, thick slices of ham as Van Helsing.
The designs, costumes and sets in the film are really impressive, and the film is too lavist andinventive to ever really be scary.  It adapts the novel relatively faithfully, aside from the unnecessary prologue explaining Dracula's origins, and the subplot of Dracula believing Mina to be his reincarnated wife.
The problem is that the lavish, epic treatment doesn't really work for horror, because it just seems to dilute the scary elements.