Fanny och Alexander 1982

Vincent Canby, New York Times: 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. Read more

Logan Hill, New York Magazine/Vulture: This premiere of the original cut, running at 312 minutes, leaves room for more than a story of one life. Read more

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader: The result is one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: 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. Read more

Damon Smith, Boston Globe: 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. Read more

David Ansen, Newsweek: Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: [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. Read more

Geoff Andrew, Time Out: 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. Read more

Melissa Anderson, Time Out: Read more

Variety Staff, Variety: 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. Read more

Lance Goldenberg, Village Voice: A sprawling, ornately constructed entertainment. Read more

Aaron Hillis, Village Voice: 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. Read more

Michael Atkinson, Village Voice: 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. Read more