Obsessed with the ideas of love, life, death, good and evil, [Bergman] mediates as he goes, taking in symbols, in parables and images that are often of breathtaking beauty.

| Apr 20, 2022

You can hunt about in the history of the cinema and bring up a distant cousin or two for Bergman's great work. Yet, when all the delving is done, this film remains something quite distinct, a wonderful film which is not quite like any other.

| Mar 21, 2018

Bergman's visually striking medieval morality play [was] the work that gained him an international reputation.

| Jul 23, 2013

Swedish cinema titan Ingmar Bergman's mopey/earthy 1957 breakthrough The Seventh Seal may have done more than any other film to popularize and demonize the notion of world cinema as the boutique of the cultural intelligentsia.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 15, 2009

Film has superior technical narrative, impressive lensing and thesping.

| Mar 26, 2009

Its view of a seemingly godless landscape in the grip of plague is still bold and frightening.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 7, 2007

It survives today only as an unusually pure example of a typical 50s art-film strategy: the attempt to make the most modern and most popular of art forms acceptable to the intelligentsia by forcing it into an arcane, antique mold.

| Jul 30, 2007

The Seventh Seal is an existentialist masterpiece packed with stunning symbolism and mordant humour. It's also far more accessible that you might think. Go see it. Or else.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2007

Bergman's superbly shot wintry images, much like those of a silent film, print themselves indelibly on the mind, while the Knight's search for a God who never answers foreshadows the pessimism of the director's later work.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 20, 2007

Not a friendly film, but in the consciousness of suffering, the search for meaning and the acceptance of death, all (or nearly all) of Bergman is in it.

| Jul 20, 2007

It is endlessly imitated and spoofed; it is also an august pinnacle of high-risk, high-art filmmaking, and one with a reputation for being far more forbidding and humourless than it actually is.

| Jul 20, 2007

Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 20, 2007

Ingmar Bergman's black and white masterpiece The Seventh Seal has matured like a great wine over 50 years.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 20, 2007

Full of haunting, iconic images and a touch of hopeful humanity, The Seventh Seal is cinema at its most artful, a philosophical meditation on the meaning(lessness) of this mortal coil.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 20, 2007

Fear, peril and hoplessness soak every frame.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 20, 2007

Dark but beautiful.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 20, 2007

Not only highly impressive but thought-provoking, relevant and intensely moving in our present, nervous, times.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 9, 2006

Essentially intellectual, yet emotionally stimulating, too, it is as tough -- and rewarding -- a screen challenge as the moviegoer has had to face this year.

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

Starkly existential, boldly poetic, slow and grim… has haunted film aficionados, baffled and bored college students, inspired innumerable parodists, and challenged both believers and unbelievers for nearly half a century.

| Original Score: A- | Apr 16, 2003

This is an uncompromising film, regarding good and evil with the same simplicity and faith as its hero.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000