Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead is a mélange of moods and genres ranging from Gothic horror to Bergmanesque spiritual rumination.

The new picture comes supplied with the same tension [as Taxi Driver], but, though I hate to say so, it feels like a package.

Its hard-to-pin-down tone is frighteningly original -- simultaneously world-weary and adolescent with an aura of perpetual anxiety, as if the characters and filmmakers were in pursuit of a catharsis everyone knows will never come.

A soul-deep mix of medical extremity and spiritual reckoning, Bringing Out the Dead lets Cage sink into the bleary mania of a man strung out on his inability to make a difference.