Blade Runner remains unsurpassed in its art direction, a futurist reworking of forties noir. It's the best looking film in years, and contains the only credible science-fiction vision since A Clockwork Orange. Here the future trashes our present, turning Los Angeles circa 2019 into a chaos polluted with hovering neon, "cityspeaking" gangsters, and high-tech gone thoroughly to seed. Based extremely loosely on master s-f writer Philip K. Dick, the film follows a "blade runner" cop (Harrison Ford) recalled to duty to eliminate sophisticated "replicant" robots, officially outlawed on Earth. But the line between his Chandleresque alienation and the replicants' deficiencies of soul turns exceedingly thin.-Scott Simmon