"Almereyda uses New York clubs as the backdrop for this vampire saga — a stroke of genius — much the way Jean Cocteau did when, in "Orphee," he set the myth of Orpheus among a group of squabbling Left Bank poets — as a means of giving a classic story a sharp, contemporary edge. Almereyda shares some of Cocteau's sense of film as a magic plaything. Shot in hallucinatory black-and-white by Jim Denault — who also works the Pixelvision camera used in some sequences — the film has an atmosphere that fluctuates between languid and hysterical. Visually, it's a thrilling movie, gorgeously, hypnotically textured. Images fly in from all over—a snippet of Bela Lugosi's Rorschach eyebrows, a few frames of a ravishing peasant girl, a grainy long shot of a skulking, caped figure — as if Almereyda had found a way of patching directly into the collective pop id." - Hal Hinson, Washington Post