Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

There just isn't much going for this movie. It's a propaganda piece that we get a lot of, but aren't willing to admit to, propaganda by atheists.However, no one really cares here, because it is not possible to stay awake through this ordeal. Director Dreyer is no Beyer. His speed figures are Zero.The story is one of a one dimensionally evil society, with a monster for a parson, who burns a feeble old lady under the guise of her being a witch, and who is married to a woman younger than his son by a previous marriage.The parson is so vicious and hypocritical, that the movie comes across as a joke. This is the cliché hypocritical bible thumper you see in millions of movies, but never in real life. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for 1942, and say it may not have been as total a cliché that doesn't exist as it does today.One can't give the benefit of the doubt, however, for propagandists contending it was a true story. Based on truth, they merely make a one dimensional farce out of the entire story.One can't care about any of the characters, except perhaps the feeble old lady who is burned to death. And that makes this slow paced ordeal seem even longer. You will be fast forwarding through this tedious garbage, and nothing will surprise you at the end. Just a typical, dull, fairly predictable ending.I probably would have given it 4/10 or even 5/10 for acting, scenery, and for the turmoil of the old lady, but the incredible dullness, the result of pathetic writing and directing, makes it impossible to rate this more than 2/10.

Just borrowing a phrase with my summary, and not trying to trivialize "Day Of Wrath", an extraordinarily powerful film. I think we in the States are not used to films as masterfully done and as impactful as this one.In the 17th century - Europe as well as in the States - witchcraft and witch hunts were all the rage, an age of ignorance during the Age Of Enlightment. How quaint and simplistic a notion that someone could be a witch just by anothers accusation! Director Carl Dreyer brings this idea home to us in this methodical masterpiece in harrowing detail. His story centers on a young Danish woman who goes from mouse-wife to temptress to doomed heroine. She is surrounded throughout the picture by hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness and in the end she succumbs to Christian ideals, the same ones she had been struggling to suppress for most of the picture.You can watch until your eyes drop out and you won't find a scene not executed to perfection in all departments. I am not familiar with the actors but they were outstanding down to the smallest part. The pacing, like a Bergman film, is slow and deliberate, much the same way it would have been lived out in the 1600's. The Inquisition-type scene involving the old accused woman is even slower still, making the scene all the more horrifying, even though the torture is in the viewers mind and not on screen. Note how slowly the camera pans around the chamber of judges.There are so many scenes worth mentioning, but it's best to see the picture for yourself if you haven't. It is an unforgettable treatment of nasty, unsavory material.

Yes. It's true the film is beautifully shot, with some superb camera-work. I think the opening scene is sheer genius as the camera slowly moves to reveal all the elements of the scene one by one. Brilliant! The lighting is atmospheric, with a beautiful, evocative use of shadows, especially the rippling of leaves which somehow echoes the fire to come... Even the acting is fairly good throughout. But is it enough? Emotionally, it's fairly difficult to come to grips with a story in which the only character with any degree of integrity is the old woman who is burned as a witch early on. Perhaps the mother, too, has a certain degree of consistency about her behaviour, though I wouldn't want to meet her on a dark night! As for the others... a mixed bag of self-interested whingers, ready to do the hypocritical dirty at a moment's notice.Perhaps none of this should matter, but there's a kind of insistent dreariness to proceedings which gives the viewer just a little too much time to think about whether he/she (or me, in this case) really gives a damn what happens to any of these people. And certainly it gave me enough time to wonder whether some of the dialogue - especially the husband/wife discussion re love - wasn't just a little too modern for what purports to be a period piece.Yes. It was made during the occupation. Etc. Etc. And? It would have been just as easy to adhere to the internal logic and arrive at the same message... ah...The message...What, exactly, was it? I mean, I suppose I assumed it was to decry Man's-Inhumanity-to-Man, the absurdity of burning poor old ladies (or young ones)as witches. But was it? Perhaps I'm wrong, because, at the end, it seems "like mother, like daughter". The mother was a witch and the daughter not only seems to be convinced she has the same powers to kill, but actually manages to use them!!! Apparently.So are witches meant to be real? And, if they go around killing people who've done nothing more than show them a little kindness (the husband, in his own, misguided way), isn't the world better off without them? Hmmmm. By the end of the film, albeit detesting the son's cowardice, I was thoroughly confused.Sorry. Not a patch on "Vampyr", which - for my money - really IS a masterpiece!!! This film simply paved the way for some of Bergman's more tedious offerings...

Talk about a haunting movie, and not just in the awful beauty of the compositions; I'm talking about the whole vision. I have spent days grappling with it. Holding out hope for humanity under the bleakest possible circumstances, this fifteenth-century witch hunt story doesn't just flip the good-evil paradigm. The victims of the witch hunt have their own superstitions, their own petty indulgences and murderous impulses; the perpetrators have their own moral agonies. This is a movie about the individual's struggle against a corrupt society where the individual loses: deadly grim, it shows exactly how f*cked-up things can get, and doesn't provide any easy answers about how to get out from under it, except crucially to assert that it can't be done alone. But the agonizingly tragic sense of loss and corruption - of youth, of love, of freedom - can only come, I think, from a deep belief that a better world is possible. If you hate Ingmar Bergman, you probably will not get this, yet another dour and glacial Scandinavian narrative of yet another dark night of the soul. But the mood is not just a mannerism, and the craft is so brilliant that I for one was able to overcome all my biases and get totally swept away in it, overwhelmed. Dreyer really, really knows what he's doing.