"Harry Angel" (Mickey O'Rourke) lives a pretty hand-to-mouth existence as a New York PI when he is hired to track down a musician named "Johnny Favorite". Now this fella really doesn't want to be found, and after a while our street-smart investigator begins to contemplate that maybe this search isn't really all that his employer "Louis Cyphre" (a Rasputin-esque Robert De Niro) has in mind. As the search becomes more…

*Angel Heart* spends most of its running time pretending to be a detective story in which Harry Angel is following a trail into somebody else’s darkness. Its best trick is that the trail is his. Alan Parker shoots that investigation like a noir already half swallowed by something older. Rooms are all long shadows and backlight; New Orleans sometimes looks almost monochrome, until a little blue exhaust smoke gives…