Rating: 
Summary: Woefully underrated
Review: "Hour of the Wolf" is one of Bergman's finest films, but it is relatively little-known even among his fans. It is a dark, disturbing portrait of encroaching insanity that skillfully blurs the line between reality and increasingly deranged fantasies. The supporting cast is especially memorable, blending Gothic horror with black humor. The leader of the fantasy creatures bears a strong resemblance to Bela Lugosi, and it's hard to believe that the likeness is coincidental.Some viewers have complained that this film lacks the meaningful symbolism of many other Bergman works. Though arguably true, this criticism doesn't seem relevant here. The images in "Hour of the Wolf" are chosen for their disquieting gut-level impact, not for grand symbolic reasons. People who enjoy surrealism, 1930s horror movies, and intimate character studies will find this film thoroughly rewarding.
Rating:
Summary: bergman's best, a terrifying masterpiece
Review: "hour of the wolf" is,...far from a 'lesser' bergman film:it is his best. johann (max von sydow), and his wife alma (liv ulmann), retreat to an island with one another and try to live a serene, peaceful life while johann works on his art. to say the least, it doesn't exactly pan out. slowly but surely, johann's demons pursue him and whether they actually 'exist' or not is neither here nor there as far as the message of the movie goes. the most crucial scene is when the puppet show takes place in the demons' castle, and mozart's "magic flute" is done by the birdman, papageno. the darkness and meaninglessness of the human condition is reflected in the lines of mozart's character:"eternal night, eternal night, when whilst thou flee? when will mine eye the daylight see?" while these lines are recited by the birdman after the puppet show by papageno, a slow close up is gotten on his intensely evil face, and the lines are delivered with reverence and an inflection of utter doom and hopelessness. the answer is what johann already knows all too well--never. the artist's (and, by extension, man as a whole) attempts to know reality, to understand the purpose of his life and the meaning of existence, will come to naught, and he will be particularly unfortunate since, unlike the rest of the human race, he alone realizes the shadow of ephemerality and incomprehensibility cast all over life. the beginning and the end of the movie are more or less rational, in that there is nothing left but for johann to lose his mind. johann and alma, despite their intense love for one another, are just as cut off and unknown to one another as all human beings, and her attempts to save him are futile. this film is a masterpiece, and masterfully utilizes the surreal and the imaginative to display bergman's unpleasant truth.
Rating:
Summary: Woefully underrated
Review: "Hour of the Wolf" is one of Bergman's finest films, but it is relatively little-known even among his fans. It is a dark, disturbing portrait of encroaching insanity that skillfully blurs the line between reality and increasingly deranged fantasies. The supporting cast is especially memorable, blending Gothic horror with black humor. The leader of the fantasy creatures bears a strong resemblance to Bela Lugosi, and it's hard to believe that the likeness is coincidental. Some viewers have complained that this film lacks the meaningful symbolism of many other Bergman works. Though arguably true, this criticism doesn't seem relevant here. The images in "Hour of the Wolf" are chosen for their disquieting gut-level impact, not for grand symbolic reasons. People who enjoy surrealism, 1930s horror movies, and intimate character studies will find this film thoroughly rewarding.
Rating:
Summary: One of his best
Review: A famous painter, Johan (Max von Sydow), and his wife (Liv Ullmann) arrive on a small island where Johan plans to recollect his thoughts and find himself in his painting. He suffers from insomnia and bad nerves, and his nights are spent waiting in horror for the magical hour before dawn, the hour of the wolf, when a flood of memories, anxieties, and regrets transcend thoughts and appear as demonic apparitions which threaten to consume him. Johan's wife, Alma, must help him overcome his dangerous obsessions with his ghosts before the manifestations become too real, and its too late... The Magician and Hour of the Wolf are my two favorite Bergman movies -- the reason being the flaws of these films only make them stronger by serving the point. In the Magician its an artist's fear of having his cheap trickery exposed for what it is, and his inability to make "pure" art. The fact that Bergman had to sell the film as an "erotic comedy" with a silly subplot doesn't make the film weaker: it just reinforces it with irony. In the same way, the Hour of the Wolf was clearly made by a nervous and overworked artist: at this point the critics were out for blood with Bergman, ready to declare his career over and his movies indulgent exercises in his popular image. Bergman himself was having a rough time, with a theatre and a film career exhausting him and his marriage falling to pieces. But for Hour of the Wolf, any resignation, nervousness, or indulgence merely serves to strengthen the film's message. Hour of the Wolf is a desperate film, and because of that, I think its in this film that Bergman comes closest to his own artistic vision: That place where dreams, memories, and anxieties come together and become indistinguishible (something he would have a harder time conveying in films like Face to Face). The film is beautifully made, with Sven Nykvist collaborating as usual. Bergman and his cohort were cutting close to perfect in craft around this period. The flood of images is overwhelming. Some favorite scenes: Johan struggling with a small boy while fishing, the dinner party (the pressure!), and of course, the famous "Magic Flute" scene, with the small puppet moving almost imperceptibly as a real man. And that prevalent Bergman talking point, Mozart, and the chorus' breathless chanting: "Pamin-na still lives." (lit. "Love still lives") An emotional and personal film, one of his best.
Rating:
Summary: What is real?
Review: An artist confronts hisself while slowly going insane. Like a dream, everything that appears to be happening, in fact never happens. Reality does not exist as we know it. Rather we experience this great Bergman creation, through the eyes of an artist who lives his life in torment,A life that never really happens... but It does. This creation asks us, what is real. How do we live? Does the imagination, perhaps of an individual creating events, coming from an artist's mind become real if it is strong enough. This artist becomes so wrapped up in his thoughts that he gets lost. But is is so beautiful, so terrible, so complex and simple. A great intellectual piece! It can be gone over many many times, and their is always something to learn about it. It changed the way I watched film. And the way I viewed my self. END
Rating:
Summary: "You See What You Want To!"
Review: Bergman's amazing "Hour of the Wolf", his audacious, overt horror film, has finally been given the deluxe DVD treatment by MGM. There's a featurette titled "The Search for Sanity" and an insightful commentary track by Bergman biographer Marc Gervais. Max Von Sydow is the depressed artist whose inner demons take corporeal form in the shape of the ghosts (or vampires?) who live in the nearby castle. Liv Ullmann is Von Sydow's pregnant wife who is eventually drawn into her husband's madness. The images are frequently upsetting and even overpowering; Gervais recounts that many of the early viewers of this film couldn't sleep afterwards. The high point comes when the Bela Lugosi look-alike demon proclaims to Von Sydow: "You see what you want to!" In other words, it's the artist himself, by surrendering to his despair, who is pumping life and existence into the monsters. It's been said that God doesn't really condemn us: we condemn ourselves. That seems to be Bergman's central point in this unforgettable, terrifying film.
Rating:
Summary: A little known Gem
Review: Bergman's Hour of the Wolf never received the attention that many of his other works did, but the very things critized about this film are the things I adore about it. Revealing the layers of an artist's mind as he goes insane-- the film takes you with the artist with shocking ease. And the depth created through the stark images and the altered conscious ambiance mark this as a masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: wrongly cropped from OAR 1.37:1 to 1.66:1 and it looks awful
Review: I like this movie but unfortunately MGM messed up the aspect ratio of the film. This film was originally 1.37:1 not 1.66:1 as it's presented here. I guess they felt it was necessary to cut the actors' heads off in this print. Perhaps one day they will correct this mistake but for now, stay away from this dvd.
Rating:
Summary: MGM messed it up
Review: I like this movie but unfortunately MGM messed up the aspect ratio of the film. This film was originally 1.37:1 not 1.66:1 as it's presented here. I guess they felt it was necessary to cut the actors' heads off in this print. Perhaps one day they will correct this mistake but for now, stay away from this dvd.
Rating:
Summary: One of the cinema's most potent horror films.
Review: In the 1940s and 50s, one of the most common traits of Ingmar Bergman's style was his narrative playfulness, the way he deliberately blurred the boundaries between different levels of narrative reality, dream, theatre, hallucination, fantasy etc. From the 60s on, this became less a feature of his work, as his films became more austere and seemingly direct. These were still about acting, about the various performances with which we conduct real life, but now formal ambiguity gave way to the clear gaze of the camera, beneath which performances were tested, discarded, stripped away. An exception is this terrifying masterpiece, about a fraught painter on a remote island who gets involved with the strange inhabitants of a nearby castle. Inspired by the work of ETA Hoffmann, Bergman, like most horror artists, piles on the framing devices, distancing us further and further from the source of the horror - not to make it easy on the audience; on the contrary, the method helplessly admits the essential unknowability of any human being, the impossibility of ever truly connecting, of ever being able to help. These devises may sound rather academic and alienating, but they serve a number of important purposes. Firstly, and most importantly, like most great horror works, the story attempts to place a rational framework on the irrational, and fails. The narrative frames eventually collapse, and it becomes impossible to redraw boundaries. This matches the film's main theme, which is a woman's failure to understand her husband's trauma, her own loss of identity in trying to empathise and work it out. We are invited to share in mental breakdown, its labyrinthine terrors, but Bergman doesn't allow us the reassurance of coming up for air. This breakdown is reflected in Bergman's technique, which moves from documentary cinema verite, in which the director talks to his actors about the story's genesis; to a Sjostrom-like evocation of a rugged natrual environment; to the intense focus on a disintegrating relationship typical of later Bergman, told in close-up long-takes; to the weird kinetic frenzy of the castle sequence, a bizarre (parodic?) melange of Tod Browning, Resnais, Fellini and 'Rosemary's Baby'; to that visually extraordinary and narratively unbearable climactic maze and back again. Max von Sydow's anguish is so paralysing as to be unwatchable; from the moment he forces his wife to look at his paintings, we can't tell wheter he's a genius or madman. Of all the great horror tableaux (including a man walking up a ceiling, and the black mass reunion of two lovers), I think my favourite is that of Naima Wifstrand literally removing her face.
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