In Dreams

As part of his ongoing project to turn himself into Clive Barker, Neil Jordan directs his coadaptation (with Bruce Robinson) of Bari Wood’s novel Doll’s Eyes. It’s about a New England housewife (Annette Bening) possessed by a vengeful psychotic (Robert Downey Jr.) who controls her dreams, and if it were a vignette in the old EC comic book Tales From the Crypt, I’d probably give it a B-minus or a C-plus. Unfortunately, this takes a lot longer to watch than one of those tales ever took to read, and the strident tone of hysteria is too unvaried to allow for much suspense or sense of character to take shape; Bening alone wore me down in about ten minutes. Some pretty autumn foliage, a couple of nice visual effects, and Downey in his manic prime all couldn’t prevent me from wanting this to end a lot sooner than it did. With Aidan Quinn (the husband) and Stephen Rea (the shrink). (JR) Read more