The Crow

Exactly one year after young rock guitarist Eric Draven and his fiancée are brutally killed by a ruthless gang of criminals, Draven, watched over by a hypnotic crow, returns from the grave to exact revenge.

Critics largely embraced The Crow as a visually ferocious piece of comic-book filmmaking — darker and grittier than the Burton Batman films it was frequently compared to — with Brandon Lee's performance and tragic death casting an inescapable shadow over the whole experience. The cinematography, production design, and soundtrack were singled out as unusually cohesive, and most reviewers felt that the post-accident reshoots actually sharpened the film rather than compromised it. The one real fault line was whether the film transcended its genre: Berardinelli saw the changes as pushing it toward the mainstream rather than elevating it, while others treated it as the high-water mark of live-action comic adaptation.