| 100 |
Rolling Stone
It's a mesmerizing spectacle.
|
| 90 |
Village Voice
Manages to turn a highly dubious concept into a subtle and deliciously mordant comedy.
|
| 88 |
Baltimore Sun
Paints 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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| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
"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.
|
| 88 |
Boston Globe
He'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.
|
| 84 |
Mr. Showbiz
Might be the most original film of the year.
|
| 83 |
Entertainment Weekly
Kicky, elaborately constructed fantasy.
|
| 80 |
Washington Post
Diabolically amusing without plunging into the Mel Brooks zone, and it's smart without being pedantic. And it's genuinely scary at times.
|
| 80 |
Dallas Observer
Without question, Shadow of the Vampire is a stately and elegant horror film, interwoven with delicious strands of black comedy.
|
| 80 |
The New York Times
At once wildly metaphorical and distressingly literal-minded, Shadow of the Vampire tries, with mixed success, to be scary, funny and profound all at once.
|
| 75 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Hypnotic and fun.
|
| 75 |
USA Today
Feast upon a career-peak Willem Dafoe performance as a bat-eared fiend who is foul, funny, ferocious, forlorn and unforgettable.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Tribune
His (Dafoe's) re-creation of Schreck is an Oscar-level performance, but more than that, it's an unforgettable one: great, scary, horrifically funny.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
Malkovich is wryly amusing as German director F.W. Murnau, and Dafoe steals the show as a vampire playing an actor playing a vampire.
|
| 75 |
New York Daily News
Works on several playful levels. Most obviously, it is a horror movie in which life imitates art on a movie set.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Dafoe never reverts to campy, movie-monster gestures but seems liberated, consumed by his character, inspired to give a performance that's intuitive and otherworldly.
|
| 75 |
New York Post
A clever, funny, extended joke about ruthless directors, method actors and the power of the cinema.
|
| 70 |
TV Guide
A creepy, clever, film buff's delight of a fantasy.
|
| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
Willem 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.
|
| 70 |
Film.com
It'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.
|
| 70 |
LA Weekly
Malkovich and Dafoe play off each other with a devilish hamminess.
|
| 67 |
Portland Oregonian
Built on an absolutely marvelous idea but manages to make only about two-thirds of a good movie of it.
|
| 67 |
Austin Chronicle
For all its stentorian performances, though, Shadow of the Vampire is a bit much, from the detailed period sets to the final, bloody scene.
|
| 63 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
A bit of a one-joke wonder.
|
| 63 |
Miami Herald
Worth 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.
|
| 60 |
Film.com
If only this movie were rich enough, strong enough to be worthy of this (Dafoe's) performance.
|
| 60 |
TNT RoughCut
In 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.
|
| 60 |
New York Magazine
It'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.
|
| 50 |
Slate
There 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.
|
| 50 |
Chicago Reader
Mark Peranson
It's odd that a movie featuring a great classical director is notable for some extremely contemporary acting.
|
| 30 |
Salon.com
An 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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