Criterion is proud to present these Dreyer masterpieces on DVD for the first time, with brand new digital transfers. Each is an intense exploration of the clash between individual desire and social expectations, with Dreyer’s famously perfectionist attention to detail shining throughout.
Carl Th. Dreyer
1943 • 97 minutes • 1.33:1 • Denmark
Spine: #125 Edition: Collector’s Sets
The young wife of an older pastor falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village, where stepping outside the bounds of the village’s harsh moral code has disastrous results. Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath remains an intense, unforgettable experience.
Carl Th. Dreyer
1964 • 119 minutes • 1.33:1 • Denmark
Spine: #127 Edition: Collector’s Sets
Carl Dreyer’s last film is a meditation on tragedy, individual will, and the refusal to compromise. A woman leaves her unfulfilling marriage and embarks on a search for ideal love—but neither a passionate affair with a younger man nor the return of an old romance can provide the answer she seeks.
Carl Th. Dreyer
1925 • 107 minutes • 1.33:1 • Denmark
Spine: #706 Editions: Dual Format Blu-ray/DVD, DVD
Before he turned to the story of Joan of Arc, the Danish cinema genius Carl Theodor Dreyer fashioned this ahead-of-its-time examination of domestic life.
Carl Th. Dreyer
1955 • 125 minutes • 1.33:1 • Denmark
Spine: #126 Edition: Collector’s Sets
In Carl Dreyer’s Ordet, a farmer’s family is torn apart by faith, sanctity, and love—one child believes he’s Jesus Christ, a second proclaims himself agnostic, and the third falls in love with a fundamentalist’s daughter.
Carl Th. Dreyer
1928 • 81 minutes • 1.33:1 • France
Spine: #62 Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray
Spiritual rapture and institutional hypocrisy come to stark, vivid life in one of the most transcendent masterpieces of the silent era.
Carl Th. Dreyer
1932 • 73 minutes • 1.19:1 • Denmark
Spine: #437 Editions: DVD, Blu-Ray, iTunes
With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s brilliance at achieving mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, profoundly unsettling imagery was for once applied to the horror genre. Yet the result is nearly unclassifiable. Vampyr is one of cinema’s great nightmares.