A series of exquisitely written and often lavishly staged set pieces punctuated by the punishments of Alexander...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 2, 2022

In "Fanny and Alexander," Ingmar Bergman has put the magic back into his lantern.

| Apr 27, 2018

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 17, 2011

A sprawling, ornately constructed entertainment.

| Dec 3, 2008

This premiere of the original cut, running at 312 minutes, leaves room for more than a story of one life.

| Dec 1, 2008

Sumptuous, haunting, and unusually tender... a nakedly psychological 'in' to [Bergman's] earliest artistic impulses; nothing else in his oeuvre addresses so directly his childhood escapes into fantasy as the by-product of a harsh Lutheran upbringing.

| Jan 8, 2008

Dickensian in its extravagant emotional power - with a hint of Charlotte Bront - and some Chekhov in its melancholy.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 10, 2007

An accomplished masterpiece, with excellent performances and rarely bettered direction.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 10, 2007

The result is one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films.

| Aug 1, 2007

A sumptuously produced period piece that is also a rich tapestry of childhood memoirs and moods, fear and fancy, employing all the manners and means of the best of cinematic theatrical from high and low comedy to darkest tragedy.

| Aug 1, 2007

It's a marvellously engrossing and thought-provoking film, filled with dazzling dramatic set-pieces and witty, knowing allusions to its creator's artistic conceits and deceits.

| Jan 26, 2006

A fitting introduction to the very personal cinema of this master craftsman, not only because it exhibits Bergman's signature themes and stylistic devices, but also because it is one of his most life-affirming films.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 5, 2004

[Bergman] glides beyond the mere telling of his story into a kind of hypnotic series of events that have the clarity and fascination of dreams. Rarely have I felt so strongly during a movie that my mind had been shifted into a different kind of reality.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 23, 2004

It is very much, and in the best way, an old man's movie, the work of an artist resigned to life's mystery, full of wonder at the passage of time, full of forgiveness for past wrongs, and full of understanding.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 27, 2004

Bergman's 1982 career summation and the kind of rich, timeless, cautionless magnum opus we can only receive, like benedictions, from artists who've paid their generation's dues of sweat, risk, tears, and honesty.

Full Review | May 18, 2004

A big, dark, beautiful, generous family chronicle, which touches on many of the themes from earlier films while introducing something that, in Bergman, might pass for serenity.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 20, 2003