Recensioni di Metacritic

Bold, gruesome and melancholic, this Gothic horrorfest offers us much to sink our teeth into: Cruise - who effectively disappears from the screen for half the film's duration - is terrific, Dunst eerily compelling, Banderas hypnotic.

His sumptuous film is as strange and mesmerizing as it is imaginatively ghastly. It's a sophisticated, spookily intense rendering of Ms. Rice's story.

But if you can get swept up in the story, the movie is imaginative and compelling.

A stronger plot engine might have drawn us more quickly to the end, but on a scene by scene basis, Interview with the Vampire is a skillful exercise in macabre imagination.

When Interview with the Vampire works, it's as compelling and engrossing a piece of entertainment as is available on film today. When it falters, the weaknesses seem magnified.

But for all its visionary brilliance, the movie version of Interview never lets us close enough to see ourselves in Louis. We're dazzled but unmoved.

It is, however, a very satisfying film, and surely the first in a long franchise (it does, after all, bear the subtitle The Vampire Chronicles).

Unfortunately, the story, adapted by Anne Rice from her best-selling novel, sucks at the neck a little too long. A 23-minute snipping from this 123-minute movie would have done wonders.

Dramatically, though, the film is torpid.

Lestat, like all vampires, is a bad boy frozen in time; because the role is emotionally static and one-note, it can't hold our attention unless it's played by an actor with deep reserves of mystery, elegance, and sexual power. Cruise has no such qualities.