The Thirteenth Floor

Well acted and crisply directed, this latest version can at least make a claim to competence. more

A solid, interesting B-movie, in another season it would seem a good deal fresher. more

Comes too late, far surpassed by similar and more visually stunning devices in "The Matrix," and even by the mind-bending realities of "eXistenZ." more

Things become almost too strange and convoluted to handle. The story's dramatic effectiveness starts to seriously malfunction. The fascinating and the mysterious become the silly and occasionally comical. more

Darkly elegant cinematography helps compensate for awful dialogue and lackluster acting. more

There is a very good movie stuck somewhere on The Thirteenth Floor trying to get out. Too bad this isn't it. more

No-one's-home acting by Bierko and Mol doesn't help, while the talented D'Onofrio ("The End of the World") and Mueller-Stahl (a veteran of European pictures) are better than the material. more

Terry Gilliam's “12 Monkeys” can teach The Thirteenth Floor a little something about how to have fun with time travel. And with one number less.

Despite earnest performances by Mueller-Stahl, Bierko, Mol and Vincent d'Onofrio (in the duel role of a programmer and a VR bartender), the movie feels like a bit of a rehash. more

Rusnak, who was the second-unit director of "Godzilla," brings plenty of style to this ambitious yet utterly anticlimactic thumb-sucker. more

but you shouldn't. This is a very good movie and most any sci-fi or cyber freak should enjoy it. The premise is that in the near future a Los Angeles-based company has almost perfected a virtual reality system so real that a customer can jack into it and experience 1937 L.A. as a real person, interacting with cyberpeople who behave as real as their real-world counterparts. When the Craig Bierko character's boss (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) turns up dead, our hero has no choice but to go into the 1937 reality. He discovers a very spooky thing: those 1937 characters have developed an... more

Here are a few elements of this movie that might appeal to some people: Firstly, it presents a clearer, more sensible idea of how virtual reality works than its 1999 movie siblings "THE MATRIX" or "eXistenZ". And it does it thoughtfully, without mind-numbing action scenes and special-effects. Secondly, the virtual reality world of L.A. in the 1930s is visually rich, yet doesn't stray too far from a realistic look. Bonus extras are Armin Mueller-Stahl's, Vincent D'Onofrio's and Dennis Haysbert's performances, Gretchen Mol's lusciousness (also enjoyably down-to-earth as a grocery clerk), and... more

Tired of explosions and bad guys who shoot hundreds of bullets but still miss their main target? Try this drama/sci fi movie. The characters are the stars, not the sets nor the action sequences. Bierko is great as the lead and has star quality. Why can't he get more roles? Gretchen Mol is beautiful and is convincing as the mysterious blonde with a hidden agenda. I don't want to give much away as this is really a classical mystery. more