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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary

EMAILPRINTZeitgeist Films

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary  reviews
84
9.5 User Score:

Movie Info

Genre(s): Romance

Written by: Mark Godden (ballet Dracula)
Bram Stoker (novel)

Directed by: Guy Maddin

Release Date:
Theatrical: May 14, 2003
DVD: May 18, 2004

Running Time: 75 minutes, B/W / Color

Origin: Canada

Summary

RATING: Not Rated

Starring Zhang Wei-Qiang, Tara Birtwhistle, Dave Moroni, CindyMarie Small, Johnny A. Wright, Stephane Leonard, Matthew Johnson, and Keir Knight

Beautifully transposing the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's interpretation of Bram Stoker's classic vampire yarn from stage to screen, Guy Maddin has forged a sumptuous, erotically charged feast of dance, drama and shadow. (Zeitgeist Films)

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Maddin takes on his first commissioned feature--an adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of Dracula--and succeeds brilliantly, making it his own while offering what may be the most faithful screen version to date of Bram Stoker's novel.

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100

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The visual style is at once deliberately archaic and slyly postmodernist, slinky and sensuous from first frame to last.

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100

New York Post V.A. Musetto

It's a highly erotic work that at no point seems staged. Credit brilliant use of fog, mirrors, silhouettes, slow motion and special effects worthy of a music video.

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100

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Guy Maddin is a scholar, poet, prankster, and ferociously devoted classicist who likes to resurrect dead cinemas and deader directors and make them vital all over again.

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90

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

It's sexy, brainy and slightly nuts.

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90

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Brings kinetic, stylistic and even sexy dimension to the Bram Stoker legend.

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90

LA Weekly John Powers

Maddin's genius is so inescapably idiosyncratic that his work seems destined to remain a cult taste. Although Dracula won't change that, I hasten to add that this is the most inventive vampire picture of the last 80 years.

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90

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

An inspired, original, and gracefully integrated collaboration of theater and cinema that complements not only both forms, but also the seductive, dreamlike qualities of the source material.

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88

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The film is poetic and erotic, creepy and melodramatic, overwrought and sometimes mocking, as if F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) had a long-lost musical version.

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80

Variety Deborah Young

Though it sounds like an offbeat idea even for horror fans, the tech work is so well done that it could disarm unwary buffs attracted by the campy title.

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80

The New York Times Stephen Holden

For all its eccentricities and technical quirks, Dracula is a compelling expressionistic work.

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80

Empire Patrick Peters

This arty approach may dismay hard-core horror fans, but it captures the dark grace of the original with wit and style.

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80

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Maddin has created a fascinating hybrid--this enraptured composition in mist, gauze, and Vaseline is more rhapsody than narrative, less motion picture than shadow play.

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75

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Succeeds despite that mismatch of artist and material.

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75

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Magnificently sensuous and macabre.

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75

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

A 75-minute tour de force that's often fascinating, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding. So be patient -- the payoff will come.

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70

TV Guide Ken Fox

Dracula fans will appreciate the witty ways in which Maddin has drawn Stoker's troubling racism and xenophobia to the fore, while making the most of the sexual ambivalence that helps make the story endlessly fascinating.

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67

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

It’s far and away the most original symphony of terror since F.W. Murnau raised hackles and Schrecks with his 1922 Nosferatu.

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50

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Maddin chops it up into a feature-length antique-bloodsucker video, and the result takes hold neither as dance nor as silent horror dream.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 9.5 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Cameron S. gave it a 9:
Guy Maddin has constructed an unworldly, beautifully elegiac and literarily faithful rendition of Bram Stroker’s Dracula in silent ballet. Up until this film, my favorite contemporary Dracula adaptation had been Francis Ford Coppola’s film, but Maddin’s film has knocked me out of my socks in one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen. Stylistically, the film looks and feels as if it had been stored in a vault for 80 years and has just now been uncovered. It is scrappy and jolty rhythmically and unfolds in ballet sets. The dances are fascinating and compelled me throughout on its hyper driven warp of engagement. What he has obtained is dreamy beyond this time’s comprehensibility. He has used a style of the past of cinema and presents his oeuvre that completely transcends anything that has ever been done with Dracula. The ballet dances invigorate and entrancement of the words, seeing Van Helsing and crew take down Mina is astonishing in how it is delivered. The final product here is rich and sensuous, it invigorates the horror genre in a completely original working and comes out as quite dreamy interpretation of words.

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