Interview with the Vampire: Critic Reviews

Interview with the Vampire promises a constantly surprising vampire story, and it keeps that promise.

The movie's energy starts to drain like blood from a vampire's victim. You'll feel that ebb, sooner or later, as you begin to glance regularly at your watch.

Passionately anticipated and much ballyhooed, the film, alas, is little more than a foppish, fang de siecle costume drama. Its pulse barely registers.

My complaint about the film is that not very much happens, in the plot sense.

The leading performances, if acceptable, are not everything they needed to be to fully flesh out these elegant immortals.

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.

Why would Tom Cruise be playing Lestat, a gaunt, suave European vampire with a taste for young men? Because a big movie star can do whatever he wants.

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.

Entertaining but gruesomely gory vampire tale.

Beautiful to look at and dripping with atmosphere

It's about seduction, and either you succumb to its inky entrapments or you resist. When its mojo was working, I was happy to be had.

...something for everyone: heterosexuality, homosexuality, eroticism, murder, mayhem, pedophilia, necrophilia, nudity, gore.

Jordan tries hard to inject some sort of Gothic sensibility into the film's early sequences, but it isn't until the third act, when the film enters the marvellously atmospheric world of the Thibtre des Vampires, that he really draws blood.

Holds plenty of interest, even for those who find Anne Rice's gothic cult novels unreadable.

Jordan is a master of poetic, deceptive atmosphere.

Anne Rice was right the first time around when she criticized Tom Cruise's casting in public, and Brad Pitt is not great either but like every Jordan's film, this problematic adaptation has some merits such as child actress Dunst and some arresting images

Given that this is basically a Reader's Digest condensed version, the movie does a pretty good sweep job.

The major problem lies with Rice's own script, which is dramatically repetitive and philosophically banal.

Tragically overproduced, with a glaring central miscast.