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34
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67
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54
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49
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34
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57
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65
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37
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58
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48
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55
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44
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53
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37
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47
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55
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33
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93
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64
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36
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54
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93
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79
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76
Shine a Light
73
Kung Fu Panda
71
Horton Hears a Who!
69
Redbelt
67
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
65
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
64
Wanted
62
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The
61
Stop Loss
61
Incredible Hulk, The
58
Mist, The
57
Forbidden Kingdom, The
57
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
55
Street Kings
55
Nim's Island
55
Baby Mama
54
You Don't Mess with the Zohan
54
Get Smart
53
Sex and the City: The Movie
49
Hancock
48
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
47
Strangers, The
44
Ruins, The
41
Drillbit Taylor
37
Made of Honor
37
Shutter
37
Speed Racer
36
College Road Trip
36
What Happens in Vegas...
35
Jumper
34
Happening, The
34
10,000 B.C.
33
Superhero Movie
31
Deception
24
Love Guru, The
22
Postal
xx
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
xx
Dark Knight, The
xx
Mamma Mia!
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

83
Alexandra
80
Band's Visit, The
76
Beauty in Trouble
47
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80
Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
59
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55
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60
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70
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49
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83
Chop Shop
83
Chris & Don. A Love Story
78
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52
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64
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73
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84
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52
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79
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62
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64
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51
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57
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86
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63
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60
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45
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55
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69
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74
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63
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68
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34
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68
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55
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69
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60
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62
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63
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82
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38
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70
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64
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30
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33
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53
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74
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52
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71
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84
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61
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72
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51
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79
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71
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76
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81
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54
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70
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72
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83
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56
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86
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79
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62
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37
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64
Water Lilies
66
When Did You Last See Your Father?
55
Without the King
72
Woman on the Beach
64
XXY
67
Year My Parents Went on Vacation, The
75
Young@Heart
86
Up the Yangtze
86
Flight of the Red Balloon, The
84
My Winnipeg
84
Edge of Heaven, The
83
Chop Shop
83
Paranoid Park
83
Alexandra
83
U2 3D
83
Chris & Don. A Love Story
82
Last Mistress, The
81
Tell No One
80
Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
80
Band's Visit, The
79
Reprise
79
Encounters at the End of the World
79
Visitor, The
78
Counterfeiters, The
76
Beauty in Trouble
76
Shotgun Stories
75
Young@Heart
74
Mongol
74
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
73
Duchess of Langeais, The
72
Woman on the Beach
72
Priceless
72
Tuya's Marriage
72
Surfwise
71
To the Limit
71
My Brother Is an Only Child
71
Roman de gare
70
Standard Operating Procedure
70
Trumbo
70
Love Songs
70
Caramel
69
Go-Getter, The
69
Operation Filmmaker
69
Jellyfish
68
Kabluey
68
Heartbeat Detector
68
Honeydripper
67
Year My Parents Went on Vacation, The
66
Son of Rambow
66
When Did You Last See Your Father?
64
Married Life
64
Dreams with Sharp Teeth
64
XXY
64
Water Lilies
64
Fall, The
63
Foot Fist Way, The
63
Gunnin for that #1 Spot
63
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
62
Stuck
62
Expired
62
Wackness, The
62
Kiss the Bride
61
OSS 117: Cairo - Nest of Spies
61
On the Rumba River
60
Fugitive Pieces
60
Brick Lane
60
Jihad for Love, A
59
Blind Mountain
57
Flawless
56
Unknown Woman
56
Then She Found Me
56
Sangre de mi sangre
55
Quid Pro Quo
55
Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
55
Irina Palm
55
Bra Boys
55
Without the King
54
Tracey Fragments, The
53
Mister Lonely
52
Diminished Capacity
52
Elsa & Fred
52
Mother of Tears, The
52
My Blueberry Nights
51
Finding Amanda
51
Promotion, The
51
Savage Grace
49
Children of Huang Shi, The
47
Bella
45
Full Grown Men
38
Life Before Her Eyes, The
37
War, Inc.
34
Holding Trevor
33
Miss Conception
30
Meet Bill
29
Red Roses and Petrol
xx
Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Night Watch
Fox Searchlight Pictures
 |
|
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for strong violence, disturbing images and language
Starring
Konstantin Khabensky,
Vladimir Menshov,
Valeri Zolotukhin,
Mariya Poroshina,
Galina Tyunina,
Yuri Kutsenko,
Aleksei Chadov,
and
Zhanna Friske
Night Watch is the first installment of a trilogy based on the best-selling Russian sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko (which also includes Day Watch and Dusk Watch). This visionary horror fantasy film features a dazzling mix of mind-blowing effects, adrenaline-fuelled action and suspenseful terror. (Fox Searchlight)
| GENRE(S): |
Action
|
Fantasy
|
Foreign
|
Horror
|
Mystery
|
Sci-fi
|
Suspense/Thriller
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Timur Bekmambetov
Laeta Kalogridis
Sergei Lukyanenko (novel)
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Timur Bekmambetov
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: June 20, 2006
Theatrical: February 17, 2006
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
114 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
Russia |
| LANGUAGE(S): |
Russian (with English subtitles) |
Original title "Nochnoy Dozor"; Silver Raven, 2005 Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film

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...
88
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
A contemporary Russian movie that you could honestly call revolutionary, more for its style than its politics.

80
The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
With its somersaulting trucks, drafts of quaffable blood, and skies full of digitized ravens, Bekmambetov's movie has every intention of whacking "The Matrix" at its own game.

75
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
Although this first chapter in a three-part tale is inevitably overburdened with back story, it ends on one hell of a cliff-hanger.

75
New York Post
Kyle Smith
Night Watch may be derivative of American movies, but when our ideas ooze out of the dank Russian filter they're weirder, crazier, grimier.

75
San Francisco Chronicle
Ruthe Stein
A wildly entertaining fantasy thriller that propels Russian cinema into the 21st century.

75
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
The movie Night Watch is - oh hell, I don't know what it is. Imaginative. A mess. A small miracle, if really filmed for $5 million. (Although in rubles, that's probably a huge budget.) The first Russian horror movie I've seen. The first horror movie I've seen of any kind with subtitles.

75
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
If you have a sneaky taste for the monstrous and a hearty appetite for the outlandish, the pulpy yet engaging Night Watch should leave you merrily sated.

75
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
The film is filled with cool little scenes of fighting and shape-shifting, and gloomy atmosphere. Subtitles themselves have morphed into gimmicks -- sometimes they float, sometimes they dissolve, sometimes they appear in unexpected places in the frame. It's all darned nifty.

75
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
The plot has something to do with the primordial battle between light and dark forces in the universe, and though several critics have written that it contains everything but the kitchen sink, I beg to differ. I saw a kitchen sink spinning around in there, too.

75
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Sean Axmaker
Bekmambetov's tone is so gravely serious that the drama tends to become arch and theatrical, despite sardonic punches of dark humor. But his imagery is striking (his imagination overcomes his limited budget), his style is assured and he's given the subtitle adaptation a dramatically dynamic dimension by giving the words the presence of an incantation taking physical form.

75
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
Although a voice-over prologue rumbles ominously in English, most of Night Watch is in the mother tongue, but even the subtitles do weird things - flying around in different sizes and fonts, punctuating the action.

75
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
It's also the first apocalypse-minded franchise that's earned its downbeat mood. The action, for starters, is post-Cold War, post-Chernobyl, post-perestroika. Darkness is so much a part of the Russian psyche it must be nice to see a local movie try to put its hand toward the Light.

70
Dallas Observer
Luke Y. Thompson
And remember, this is just part one of a trilogy. While all may not be clear yet, there's certainly enough here to make you curious about the other two parts.

70
Slate
Stephen Metcalf
For the first hour of Night Watch, a dark, arresting, and unrelentingly weird thrill ride out of post-Soviet Russia, one feels lost. Not bad lost, as with a densely clotted mess like "Underworld: Evolution," whose mythopoetics land in the viewer's lap in concrete chunks; but good lost, exhilarated lost, like what am I watching?

70
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Director Timur Bekmambetov has combined two things that never connected before. He's taken a glossy Hollywood-type fantasy thriller about the battle between supernatural forces of good and evil right here on planet Earth and infused it with a homegrown, distinctively Russian soul.

70
Washington Post
Ann Hornaday
Bekmambetov handles these narrative bumps with ease, infusing even the hoariest -- and goriest -- of horror movie cliches with equal parts macabre fascination and jaunty humor. The film lives up to its hype with a style, swagger and substance that will appeal not just to the fanboys (and girls) but to their uninitiated friends as well.

63
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
The film has the twin virtues of being bold and dizzying...The greatest disappointment with Night Watch is that, at a critical juncture, it fizzles.

63
Miami Herald
Peter Debruge
Night Watch represents the best in Russian special effects, a collaboration between 42 different CGI specialty firms all working in the service of a single goal: to create the nation's most visually transgressive film.

63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Liam Lacey
A wildly convoluted, preposterous vampire flick that is understood best as a sardonic social allegory.

60
Variety
Leslie Felperin
Russian-made pic displays pro technique and visual imagination on a par with, if not better than, Hollywood frighteners, but with a distinctive Slavic accent.

60
Village Voice
J. Hoberman
Despite its cheesy blood and thunder and ludicrous "Sunshine Makers" metaphysics, this is the funniest apocalypse I've seen since George Romero's "Land of the Dead."

60
LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
In the final act, the movie dons a more human face and commits to an absorbing tale of crime and punishment, albeit pushing the fatigued message that you can't always tell light from dark these days.

50
The New York Times
Stephen Holden
The film may be a mess - narratively muddled and crammed with many more vampires, shape-shifters and sorcerers than one movie can handle, but it bursts with a sick, carnivorous glee in its own fiendish games.

50
New York Magazine
David Edelstein
The ending is a huge letdown, doing little besides setting the stage for the sequel… But for a good hour and change, the film is a big toy box that teases you out of the Gloom.

50
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Nathan Rabin
The filmmakers don't seem to realize that if a movie with a mythology this groan-inducingly convoluted doesn't have a sense of humor about itself, the laughs are going to come anyway. They just won't be of the intentional variety.

50
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
Benshis were the Japanese performers who stood next to the screen during silent films and explained the plot to the audience. If ever a benshi were needed in a modern movie, Night Watch is that film.

50
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
The punchy, nonstop visual effects (including an animation segment and stylized subtitles that sometimes suggest an online chat) crowd out coherent storytelling.

50
USA Today
Claudia Puig
The film's mythology is a bit dodgy, and the dialogue is standard issue, but the over-the-top action sequences are occasionally fun, if gory. Ultimately, it's a formulaic, predictable take on a Hollywood staple: the vampire horror film.

50
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
Despite the film's abundant gory effects, its best technical achievement may be its English subtitles, which move about the screen for better visual and emotional impact, and sometimes dissolve into poofs of blood or other colored effects.

40
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
Everything today's young audiences are conditioned to want: incessant noise, jumpy editing, torrential music, shallow, overblown characters and sheer emptiness at its core. Imagine yourself trapped inside a two-hour video game, and you've got the Night Watch experience.

38
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
Frankly, after watching writer-director Timur Bekmambetov's grim fantasy - the first leg of a trilogy adapted from the sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko - I'm still a little confused.

0
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
A fractious fiasco: whiplash camera movement set to raging blasts of death metal, a story so incoherent it made me wish I was watching, instead, the collected outtakes from Van Helsing.


The average user rating for this movie is 6.5 (out of 10) based on 35 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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