Ministry of Fear, which comes out today in a new digital restoration from Criterion Collection, was not fondly remembered by its director. Fritz Lang needed to deliver one more feature to Paramount Pictures in order to complete a contract, and the producer-screenwriter of this one, Seton Miller, wouldn’t let him have his way with the script as he usually did. After the film was released in October 1944, Lang partnered with actress Joan Bennett and producer Walter Wanger to form an independent production company that would create some of Lang’s weirder, more sexually obsessed Hollywood films: (Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window). Ministry of Fear may suffer by comparison to those movies: set in wartime London, it operates like a conventional action thriller, with Nazi spies and a microfilm hidden in a cake. But Miller’s script, adapted from a Graham Greene novel, is so perplexing that the severity of Lang’s imagery takes over; the story seems disconnected to the point of delirium.