- Critic Score
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100It's a mesmerizing spectacle.
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90Manages to turn a highly dubious concept into a subtle and deliciously mordant comedy.
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88"Willem Dafoe is Max Schreck." I put quotes around that because it's not just a line for a movie ad but the truth: He embodies the Schreck of "Nosferatu" so uncannily that when real scenes from the silent classic are slipped into the frame, we don't notice a difference.
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88He's (Dafoe) the stuff bad dreams are made of. He's also the best movie vampire since Schreck's original. He deserves a bloody Oscar.
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88Paints a vivid and darkly humorous picture of a world where directors are all-powerful and vampires are real; whether you want to buy into either fantasy is up to you. I did, and had a grand old time.
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84Might be the most original film of the year.
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83Kicky, elaborately constructed fantasy.
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80Without question, Shadow of the Vampire is a stately and elegant horror film, interwoven with delicious strands of black comedy.
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80At once wildly metaphorical and distressingly literal-minded, Shadow of the Vampire tries, with mixed success, to be scary, funny and profound all at once.
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80Diabolically amusing without plunging into the Mel Brooks zone, and it's smart without being pedantic. And it's genuinely scary at times.
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75His (Dafoe's) re-creation of Schreck is an Oscar-level performance, but more than that, it's an unforgettable one: great, scary, horrifically funny.
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75Malkovich is wryly amusing as German director F.W. Murnau, and Dafoe steals the show as a vampire playing an actor playing a vampire.
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75Works on several playful levels. Most obviously, it is a horror movie in which life imitates art on a movie set.
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75A clever, funny, extended joke about ruthless directors, method actors and the power of the cinema.
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75Dafoe never reverts to campy, movie-monster gestures but seems liberated, consumed by his character, inspired to give a performance that's intuitive and otherworldly.
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75Feast upon a career-peak Willem Dafoe performance as a bat-eared fiend who is foul, funny, ferocious, forlorn and unforgettable.
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75Hypnotic and fun.
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70A creepy, clever, film buff's delight of a fantasy.
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70Malkovich and Dafoe play off each other with a devilish hamminess.
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70It's a great ride, gorgeous, silly and deeply intellectual by turns, but, for all its inventive fireworks, sad to say, it finally doesn't quite work.
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70Willem Dafoe's performance in Shadow of the Vampire is so irresistible it not only breaks that cycle but turns an otherwise just adequate film into something everyone will want to take a look at.
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67For all its stentorian performances, though, Shadow of the Vampire is a bit much, from the detailed period sets to the final, bloody scene.
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67Built on an absolutely marvelous idea but manages to make only about two-thirds of a good movie of it.
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63Worth seeing for Dafoe's performance alone, a singular mixture of camp and pathos that echoes the tragic, romantic allure of vampires in literature and film.
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63A bit of a one-joke wonder.
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60It's a marvelous, resonant joke that never quite succeeds: Stretches of the film resemble a Dario Argento horrorfest crossed with a Mel Brooks spoof. But the director, E. Elias Merhige, and his screenwriter, Steven Katz, occasionally bring some rapture to the creepiness, and Dafoe's vampire, with his graceful, ritualistic death lunges, is a sinewy, skull-and-crossbones horror who seems to come less out of the German Expressionist tradition than from Kabuki.
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60If only this movie were rich enough, strong enough to be worthy of this (Dafoe's) performance.
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60In the end, the performances and the basic strength of the premise make Shadow of the Vampire a relatively diverting ninety minutes. But there is the inescapable feeling that it is a shadow of the great film it might have been.
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50There are times when Dafoe's accent strays into Billy Crystal Yiddish, but the notion of Vlad the Impaler aging into a finicky old Jew has its own kind of piquancy.
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It's odd that a movie featuring a great classical director is notable for some extremely contemporary acting.
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30An academic exercise driven by adolescent ideas that never shape themselves into a narrative: in short, a movie that can never dislodge the art fatally wedged up its butt.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 10
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Mixed: 2 out of 10
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Negative: 2 out of 10
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