Gertrud

Though its Paris premiere provided a hostile reception, Dreyer's final feature was soon recognised as another masterpiece, a coolly stylised study of a proud and passionate married woman loved - but, she insists, not nearly enough - by four different men. Long, fluid takes and elegant lighting, teasingly oblique dialogue and deftly modulated performances together create a meditation on love and disenchantment that is at once insightful in its details and mysterious and affecting in its abstractions. Cinema as poetry, pared back but richly resonant.