"The distinguished director of The Passion of Joan of Arc in a moment of strangeness. He said Vampyr was not a horror film. Certainly, in a setting where images and voices fade through a sort of ghostly mist and shadows take on an independent life, where the leading man drifts from one bizarre and unsettling episode to another with a look of incomprehension on his face, an atmosphere of threat and unease is created, but it is the unease of dream, of nightmare, and is ultimately more unsettling than Hollywood’s brash efforts."

"No filmmaker gets under my skin more consistently than Fritz Lang, and while M lacks some of the paranoid extravagance of his silent fantasies, it is flawless. Peter Lorre ingeniously incarnates the evolution from lizard to man, and the director’s every shot and sound underscores the excitement of cinema in the process of discovering its own power. One of the disc’s extras finds Claude Chabrol unsuccessfully attempting to mimic a Lang camera move. The new Criterion print, with a corrected aspect ratio and restored fade-out line, burnishes the film’s deathless vitality."