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Flatliners Review: Taking on some very tough subject matter to translate cinematically, Flatliners is a benchmark film in the supernatural thriller genre. Putting a face to the phenomenon of the near-death experience, this grotesquely dark picture works reasonably well until it goes from the macabre to the contrived. While crucial to its plot structure, the moralistic bend Flatliners takes toward its ending almost single-handedly undermines the film as a whole. Set in the Windy City, fertile ground for the film's eerie life-and-death concepts, director Joel Schumacher and cinematographer Jan de Bont bathe the screen in rich, rippling green tones to give the film a spooky, ethereal effect. Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, and Julia Roberts give sincerely paranoid performances in the lead roles and Oliver Platt and William Baldwin support them equally well. Schumacher can be commended for tackling the frontier of the afterlife with ardor and open-mindedness, but had he exercised more restraint and less pedantry, the picture would remain more effective than the spine-tingling imitators it spawned. Mike DiBella, All Movie Guide

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