The Stranger

The characters are uninteresting, the mood is dour, and the big supernatural twist barely elicits a shrug. No thanks.

It's a lousy little film that is so dark and joyless that it leaves you feeling like you wasted your time watching it.

The abundant violence in "The Stranger" ... is certainly nothing new. But the movie benefits greatly from Mr. Amoedo's largely steady direction and the uniform acting skills of its Chilean cast

An amateur play at gravitas, one unsupported by dully weighted scenes and clunky dialogue, delivered mostly by English-speaking actors straining to hide Latin accents.

"Twilight" had vampires that sparkled in the sun. "The Stranger" offers another twist: bloodsuckers that bore you to death.

For viewers who don't need to suck down every last drop of vampire lore, The Stranger never gets the blood pumping.

The genre deserves better, audiences deserve better, and the people of Chile deserve better than this lazy, artless nonsense.

While it's in no way perfect, there's enough going on to keep you guessing where it's headed.

The film is a different spin on the vampire myth, but the sluggish pace and gaps in logic prevent it from having the impact you really want from a story of this type.

The Stranger feels like a piece of genre revisionism only in its deliberate, grinding pace, not in any refreshing turns of the plot.

The Stranger is a murky drifter story with vampiric influences, but what starts as a mysterious quest soon turns into just another run-of-the-mill monster movie.

The Stranger is far from a perfect film, but it's admirably eerie and remarkably restrained.