The Dying Gaul

finds it difficult to infuse humanity into a character who essentially functions as a dramatic device

The film plays for keeps: It hurts and it doesn't back away from messy questions about art, commerce and conscience.

By the end of the film, relationships have turned so corrosive that the characters leave an ugly aftertaste in the mind of the viewer.

The Dying Gaul begins with a Herman Melville quote: 'Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.' Let them serve not as words of wisdom, but of warning.

[E]xcept for some problems in the middle act, the movie is easy to swallow.

Like minimalist composer Steve Reich's prickly, tense music on the soundtrack, the movie itself is too often too intellectual, experimental and abstract.

Lucas neatly evokes an LA world he knows all too well, where beautiful people live in glass houses, virtual private museums, catch-basins for the collective wisdom of Western Civilization, wisdom its current owners seem blithely clueless about.

An absorbing, fascinating film, but disturbing and a little grim.

Sound silly? Well, it is, plus pass (as so many techno-concerned conceits soon become), self-indulgent and nihilistically nasty in tone.