Lost Souls

Winona Ryder gives a strong, atypical performance as a once-possessed woman trying to find and save a man destined to become Satan incarnate in this latest entry in the fashionable Biblical terror genre. Directed by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan), the film has a handsome, disorienting visual signature and affords Ryder and Ben Chaplin (the man she's trying to save) the latitude to develop substantial, three-dimensional characters. But the story's structure is slipshod, plot developments are frequently left dangling and it ends with an abrupt and anticlimactic thud. Still, if spooky movies based loosely on the tenets of Catholicism are your bag, Lost Souls is considerably better than other recent idiotic genre disasters such as Bless the Child, End of Days and Stigmata. Optional. (R. Blackwelder)