Strange Days

Strange Days (R) The characters in Kathryn Bigelow’s science-fiction thriller keep placing squishy-wired virtual-reality devices on top of their heads, and we see just what they see: jolting scenes of crime, sex, and mayhem, all done in hypnotic long takes, like the killer’s-eye-view shots in a slasher film. Staged as a countdown to the millennium, the movie creates a darkly logical extension of our media-wired culture of vicarious sensation seekers. The hero, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), is a motormouthed Los Angeles hustler who hawks virtual-reality ”clips” on the black market. Strange Days has a dazzling atmosphere of grunge futurism, but beneath its dark satire of audiovisual decadence lurks a naggingly conventional underworld thriller. B-