This sounds like the bug where pictures in the "Pix" folder are not displaying. The easy fix is to toggle between full screen and windowed mode, usually one of those modes works and the other doesn't. It sounds like you are in full screen mode now, so hold CTRL during launch to go to setup and try changing it to windowed mode, see if it makes a difference.
If you want to fix the root issue: usually for me this is caused by version 1.2.2.6 of Tomb_NextGeneration.dll, and when I replace the file with version 1.2.2.7 it works. You can find out which version the level is using by right-clicking the .dll, go to Properties, then look under Details for the version number. 1.2.2.7 can be downloaded
here.