- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
67The film is shot (by Dan Lausten) with a credible creepiness, and it teems with clever touches. [17 Apr 1998]
-
63Nightwatch is more stylish and well-plotted than your typical slasher film, but it doesn't quite stand out in a world where the horrific has become routine. [17 Apr 1998]
-
63Danish writer-director Ole Bornedal delivers up a stylish thriller whose murky, shot-through-pond-scum cinematography is its most distinctive feature.
-
50It's a visually effective and often scary film to watch, but the story is so leaky that we finally just give up.
-
50It's rough when it works and rough when it doesn't. Much of the first hour is made up of slow patches, while the last 20 minutes are ugly and terrifying.
-
50If not for Bornedal's stylish approach to the material and a couple of effectively chilling sequences, Nightwatch would have been a complete waste of time and effort.
-
50With its glum litany of naked corpses and mutilations, and understated actors looking bluish under the morgue's fluorescent lights, Nightwatch drains the fun out of horror. [17 Apr 1998]
-
50It comes off as an amalgam of everything that was cool in 1996, when we first saw the trailer.
-
50It's gritty, nasty, predictably meat-and-potatoes suspense, but genuinely gonzo fun nonetheless.
-
50Nightwatch is passable stuff for undiscriminating fans of the ickier-the-better genre; for the rest of us, it offers nothing new. [17 Apr 1998]
-
50The new outing - which retains the essential twists of the original, a hit overseas that was never released Stateside - has been physically enhanced with American production values and a marquee cast, but much of the earlier film's humanity and mordant humor have been lost in translation
-
50The filmmakers show habitual thriller viewers some respect by condensing the background story into iconic sound and image bites during the opening-credits sequence, suggesting they know we get the drill; this and the other stylish elements make it all the more disappointing that the movie's mediocre.
-
40Tasteless and without redeeming social value, and also dank with the stench of decomposition masked by not enough formaldehyde, Nightwatch is the best kind of movie pleasure, a completely guilty one. [17 Apr 1998]
-
38It's dreadful, despite a solid cast that includes art-house heartthrob Ewan McGregor, Nick Nolte, Patricia Arquette and Josh Brolin. [17 Apr 1998]
-
33Nightwatch is a horror for reasons that have nothing to do with suspenseful moviemaking.
-
30Nightwatch is a seriously overcast B-movie with rote performances from everyone but Brolin, who gives James an edge of danger that says that if he isn't a killer, he will be.
-
30Nightwatch spends so much time churning up eerie atmospheric effects that it doesn't have time to develop its preposterous story in which Martin finds himself accused of the murders.
-
25What we get are quirky characters who are such cartoons that they undermine the effectiveness of the scare scenes (Brad Dourif's turn as the weird doctor is an example) and well-composed camera angles that mean nothing.
-
25Nightwatch quickly declines from creepy to silly. [17 Apr 1998]
-
25The biggest failing of the film is that it's the lamest possible excuse for a whodunit. [17 Apr 1998]
User Score
tbd
No user score yet- Awaiting 2 more ratings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 1 out of 1
-
Mixed: 0 out of 1
-
Negative: 0 out of 1
-
RussellE.8