Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant and breath taking
Review: personally the people who didnt like this movie are blind! i luved it its so romantic! once i saw the movie i wanted to read the book badly. francis did an excellent job with the visual effects breath taking story and excellent characters good work!
Rating:
Summary: A Truely Beautiful Love Story...
Review: Whats not to like about this film??? Love, horror, action, beauty, symbolism, and fabulous acting!! Sure, Coppola strayed from the original text written by Stoker...but in my mind he didn't contamine a wonderful story...he made wonderful a contaminated story. I read the book and I was let down by just how much of it was pulp horror drivil...nothing really set the book apart from these terrible horror novels of the 90's that have no depth, only rediculous monsters with 7 heads. I love horror, but only when it's more than just that...when it's horror and love like this movie...or when it's horror and reality like Misery. This movie is BEAUTIFUL! No other word is fit to describe it. It's just a beautiful love story that even to this day makes me cry every time I see it. While all the others in the theater left thinking "ohh what a scary movie," or "how creepy." I left thinking what a trememdous love story. This is not pulp horror, this is not mindless, shallow monster madness...this is heart, soul, beauty, sadness, fear, supersticion, destiny, death, and LOVE!!
Rating: 
Summary: Untruth in Labeling
Review: The biggest problem with "Bram Stoker's Dracula" is that it is manifestly NOT Bram Stoker's DRACULA. Bram Stoker wrote a book about a monster who views human beings as food. Francis Ford Coppola made the story about a man simply looking for love, who had the misfortune to be a vampire.In Bram Stoker's DRACULA Mina Harker (nee Murray) was merely a tool used by Count Dracula for revenge when a small band of concerned citizens -- doctors, solicitors, British Lords, and even an American -- united to keep the Count's from turning London, the most cosmopolitan city in the world, into a smorgasbord. In "Bram Stoker's Dracula", Mina was some sort of cockamamie ancient love of the Count's (none of the backstory Coppola and his people invented make a lick of sense, so we won't delve any deeper into it). In Bram Stoker's DRACULA, an ancient horror was set loose on "modern" London, with its typewriters and phonograph records (if Stoker had written it a hundred years later, it would be the internet and e-mail). "Bram Stoker's Dracula" is a period piece that makes fun of the "modern" Victorian era and values that Bram Stoker cherished. Apart from those changes (really, more paradigm shifts that undermine the entire structure and meaning of Stoker's work to an extent that must have him rolling over in his grave), the movie isn't totally unpalatable. In the book, Abraham van Helsing is a reasonable, educated doctor, whose mind is open enough to accept that vampires exist. Anthony Hopkins is a frenetic lunatic, but his scenery-chewing is at least amusing. The rest of the cast is mixed, from the incompetent and miscast, to the sublime (Cary Elwes' Arthur Holmwood really was worthy of a better movie, for instance). The movie is loud and frequently over the top, but its blood and thunder was done with such campy panache, it earned the movie my 3-star rating. Altogether, it's not a bad vampire flick . . . but it's not Bram Stoker's DRACULA. Read the book. It's far superior. To Bram Stoker, Count Dracula was not a rebel who needed to be understood, but a devourer of humans -- a supernatural Jack the Ripper who fed on his victims; and the men and women allied against him had to kill him before they were killed by him.
Rating:
Summary: Surreal, erotic, weird, romantic .
Review: This movie is for many, i believe, an aquired taste. The bizzare speedy camera shots and episodic surrealist images may seem too strange, what to speak of Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder's accents. But even they grow on you after a while. Watching it a few times over, i began to see a clearer vision of what the director and screen writer had in mind. Despite a plot, the movie is held togeather by the intense love between Dracula and Mina (in the movie, his reincarnated wife from 400 yrs. earlier). Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins are the cream of the crop here, Hopkins as the excentric, yet practical Dr. Van Helsing, and Oldman, of course, as the perfect forlorned and despairing Dracula. Winona Ryder has a talent for playing sensitive period piece women who have inner strength they may never realize, and Keanu Reeves is underrated no matter what he does.
Rating:
Summary: Repression and release
Review: First, I watched the DVD version with the French soundtrack turned on and found it very well dubbed and clear. I loved the women's clothes and thought it interesting how they blended so well into the whole late Victorian decorating style: lush, erotic, sensual, and brightly colored. (The black and white period photos and the fading of colors in old fabrics make us think the period was drab - it wasn't.) The 19th century knew that just as food tastes better if you are hungry, the erotic is more intense after restraint and repression. The vampire, both male (Dracula) and female (the women in the castle, Lucy after her death) is the ultimate demon lover, the ultimate forbidden desire. For the Victorian woman , laced into garments so confining she could barely undress without help, her desires caged by draconian customs, her mind denied a serious education, it was an irresistable temptation. I found a lot of humor in the film. Dracula's shadow having a semi-independent existence and Johnathan's stolid attempts to studiously ignore some of his host's odder habits, such as crawling down a stone castle wall like some giant cockroach, was a real hoot as was Anthony Hopkins tongue-in-cheek Van Helsing.
Rating: 
Summary: Should be called "Based on Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'"
Review: The title is really misleading, as -- sorry folks -- the whole chick flick love story between the Count and Mina is a fabrication, not from the pen of one Abraham Stoker. There are other distortions from the novel, but this is definitely one of the best productions of the tale. While Bela Lugosi left his mark on the role, Gary Oldman does IMHO an exceptional job with the Count in Stoker's early scenes in Transylvania, with Jonathan Harker. It is definitely worthwhile to see a large part of the novel brought to life, such as the sequences involving the "children of the night", the three brides (although they pad this with manufactured material), and even the idea that Mina has a mental link with the Count. Read the novel before you watch the movie. Better still, read the novel, watch the 1922 "Nosferatu," watch the 1931 "Dracula," and then watch this one, for the whole experience.
Rating: 
Summary: Bram Stoker's Dracula? I think not
Review: I can't believe that the makers of this film have the nerve to title it "Bram Stoker's Dracula." The film ceaselessly strays from the novel and fabricates such a different story that never in my life would I call it so. The whole theme of Dracula going after Mina Murray because she looks like his fromer wife was never, ever mentioned in the novel; where the idea came from I have no clue. Small, insignificant changes I can take, a change of this magnitude I cannot. Overall, the film IS highly entertaining and has beautiful cinematography, but if you're looking to get out of a book report by watching the it, stick with cliffnotes. The only thing that the film has in common with the book is its ill-chosen title.
Rating:
Summary: I have crossed oceans of time...
Review: This is a fascinating movie, but not just for the reasons Coppola might have intended. It's a lushly shot, beautifully staged affair, oozing over-ripe, autumnal colours in obvious counterpoint to cool blues and bloodless hues asociated the cast of vampires. It is outwardly a fairly faithful rendering of Bram Stoker's novel, but in pretty much every other respect it puts a novel spin on the well worn story. For one thing, it's not very scary; any horror is supplanted by the decadence and sexuality of the film. Coppola doesn't seem to care less about frightening the viewers; he seems much more interested devloping themes: for example, people and things spend A LOT of the film falling, and climbing back up again (I suppose this is sin and redemption) and there is a real feel of decadence and over-ripeness throughout. But it's never any more focussed than that - It's not clear exactly what he's getting at, other than just inverting the conventional wisdom. The treatment of the good count is unusual; there's more than a sense that he's the victim in all of this - he's pegged out as having lost true love in tragic cirucmstances which, by operation of dastardly Christian law, inevitably pitted him against God and, by implication, the Great & Good. But the film isn't consistent about this - on one hand Dracule is painted as a noble warrior defeating the (decadent) hoardes and re-taking Constantinople and cruelly being deprived of his one love, but then later, according to Van Helsing, he's Vlad the Impaler, who ritually murdered defenceless prisoners and drank their blood. In any case the vamps definitely have the most fun: Gary Oldman has a whale of a time in the various iterations of the Dracula character (his Transylvanian accent is priceless) and Sadie Frost is sex on a stick as the doomed Lucy. Good guy Keanu Reeves, on the other hand, is as dreadful as you would expect - the man can't act, and his English accent, when he manages to hold it together, is surely one of the worst to ever have graced celluloid. I don't think Coppola succeeds in making any grand statements, though he certainly tries. But the film works at pure entertainment level, so it doesn't really matter.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't bother with Dracula.
Review: Poor Francis Ford Coppola. He must look back on this movie nowadays and tear his hair out. Well, maybe if Francis old' man had bothered to actually write a good script and maybe forget about the eye-candy and the casting ideas for just a second, this would've turned out OK. Actually, I don't know if it would. Even with the great costumes, stunning make-up and beautiful sets, the film has so many flaws it is hard to imagine it ever been great. The movie stays true to the original, which is good, and the romance has a lot of chemistry. However, this movie is so utterly confusing - What is Winona Ryder now? A heartfelt girl? A lesbian? Dracula's lover? A vampire? A witch? A werewolf? For crying out loud, you don't even know what is happening in this film. Who are the characters? You don't really figure it out until the end and it's no use then because you've ended up hating the movie. And Dracula just moves on and on without filling the plot holes of the stories it is telling. It looks lavish, but underneath the visually impressive surface of this film, there is the cheesy core which ranges from extremely laughable to just plain silly.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Dracula of them all!
Review: Of all the remakes of Bram Stoker's classic book "Dracula" this one stands out as the best I mean sure the very first Dracula was pretty good,but this one has soo much style to it that is shines spotless.You know this movie reminds me of Star Wars Episode 1 Ultimate Edition Soundtrack cause you know that cd containes every note that John Williams wrote for the film and the original cd contains bits and pieces of it.Well in this case all the other Dracula films are like the original soundtrack for Star Wars 1 and this movie is the ultimate edition cause if you think of it all the others had bits and pieces of the novel and this version contains everything from the original book.Francis Ford Coppola made great use of Bram Stoker's novel.He took all the elements of the book and stretched them waaaaaaaaaaay out and being the original first Dracula film was a mere 75 minutes while with Coppola's excellent use of stretch we get even more of our beloved Dracula to 130 minutes,but ofcourse when your dealing with Francis Ford Coppola his movies are allways looong like The Godfather series.This film is a companion to Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein(1994).They both are more true to the original book than the other films are and M,S,F was produced by Francis Ford Coppola so that might be another reson why they are both alike.Bram Stoker's Dracula,Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,and The Mummy(1999)are all three some what alike cause they are true the original stories and they stretch the elements out to over 2 hours long.Anyway if you are a Dracula movie fan and you haven't seen this movie then you aren't a true fan it shouldn't matter what kind of movie gerne you favor you have to see this movie no matter what so if you haven't seen it yet just trust me and the following several reviewers and buy it I'm sure you'll enjoy it.When I first baught it I watched it every day it was becomming a necessity to my everyday routine.Nominated for 4 Academy Awards and won 3 of them for best sound effects edditing,best costume design,and best makeup,and the left over nomination was for best set and art direction.
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