Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
Metascore
84 out of 100

Universal acclaim - based on 19 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 18 out of 19
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 19
  3. Negative: 0 out of 19
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  1. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    100
    The visual style is at once deliberately archaic and slyly postmodernist, slinky and sensuous from first frame to last.
  2. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    100
    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.
  3. New York Post
    Reviewed by: V.A. Musetto
    100
    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.
  4. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    100
    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.
  5. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: John Powers
    90
    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.
  6. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Scott Tobias
    90
    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.
  7. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    90
    It's sexy, brainy and slightly nuts.
  8. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Desson Thomson
    90
    Brings kinetic, stylistic and even sexy dimension to the Bram Stoker legend.
  9. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    88
    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.
  10. Empire
    Reviewed by: Patrick Peters
    80
    This arty approach may dismay hard-core horror fans, but it captures the dark grace of the original with wit and style.
  11. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: J. Hoberman
    80
    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.
  12. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Stephen Holden
    80
    For all its eccentricities and technical quirks, Dracula is a compelling expressionistic work.
  13. Variety
    Reviewed by: Deborah Young
    80
    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.
  14. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    75
    Magnificently sensuous and macabre.
  15. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Edward Guthmann
    75
    Succeeds despite that mismatch of artist and material.
  16. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Rick Groen
    75
    A 75-minute tour de force that's often fascinating, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately rewarding. So be patient -- the payoff will come.
  17. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    70
    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.
  18. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    67
    It’s far and away the most original symphony of terror since F.W. Murnau raised hackles and Schrecks with his 1922 Nosferatu.
  19. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    50
    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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