Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship is a touchstone of Pablo Larraín’s films, and this black-and-white Netflix movie cleverly imagines him as a vampire who surveys the broad sweep of history through the centuries...

| Mar 18, 2024

Augusto Pinochet and his long shadow of terror is transmuted, thanks to cinema, into a classic monster. Director Pablo Larraín's strategy to atone for historical horror is bold and controversial. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: A+ | Jan 18, 2024

Shows that there is no need to talk about dictatorship or oppressors and tyrants from a serious and condescending point of view. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 7, 2024

Chilean director Pablo Larraín ... has made a horror-satire, the award-winning El Conde (The Count), which imagines Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire. It is a complicated, dark, disturbing film about fascism, bourgeois corruption and counterrevolution.

| Nov 2, 2023

A provocative and unconventional satire that portrays one of Chile's most controversial political figures as the true monster he was. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 28, 2023

The movie is weird, a bit ofputting, but also sort of genius. I've never really seen the combination of dark political humor mixed with horror.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 28, 2023

El Conde is darkly entertaining and features some remarkably exquisite cinematography.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 25, 2023

The acting, the allegorical elements and the mind-blowing technical expertise (photography, locations, costuming, production design) are so inventive that there’s always something marvelous to wonder at.

| Original Score: B | Oct 11, 2023

... An entertaining half-hearted farce, frustrating and ghostly.

| Oct 9, 2023

A tremendous technical achievement... [But] it feels curiously bloodless for a movie that's so much about bloodletting.

| Oct 3, 2023

Though it has moments of dark wit (a flying sequence in the second half has a wild poetry to it), El Conde reminded me that Larraín’s filmography is wobbly. His films tend to be more interesting in their concept than in the watching.

| Oct 3, 2023

Pablo Larraín’s fascist vampire analogy somehow trivializes the Pinochet monstrosity at its core.

| Original Score: 3/10 | Oct 2, 2023

Larraín ventures deep into surrealism, transforming Pinochet into a 250-year-old vampire in a fable that is both somber and facetious.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 2, 2023

As with almost all of Larrain’s films, part of the pleasure of watching them is adjusting to the bracing uniqueness of the approach to a famous subject.

| Sep 30, 2023

El Conde is the bitterest of farces: a satire of excess and great evil that uses vampirism as a blunt metaphor for the forces that sap places and entire peoples of their share of a nation's fortunes.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 30, 2023

Yes, El Conde leans on narration often and has a muddled final stretch, but it’s Larraín at his most original and darkly amusing.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 28, 2023

El Conde is a glittering pageant of human nastiness with a theatricality that nods knowingly to the early decades of film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 28, 2023

The film’s greatest asset is Edward Lachman’s gorgeous black and white photography, whether we witness this ancient vampire indoors or soaring in the night sky.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 27, 2023

Larrain sinks his teeth into a monstrous past to exorcise, through laughter, the rage and sorrow that continue to run through the veins of Latin America. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Sep 26, 2023

This horror satire struggles to find some kind of meaning or purpose to its one-note gag, and consequently, these failures nag like the bite from a mosquito, rather than fully compel like one from a bat or vampire.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 22, 2023