Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman’s first feature. Inga Landgré plays Nelly, an 18-year-old girl raised by a piano-teacher in a small village. Nelly yearns for something more and sees an escape when her estranged mother arrives to claim her. But happiness eludes Nelly in the big city, where a complex triangle forms between her, her mother, and her mother’s gigolo boyfriend.

Ingmar Bergman’s delightful sophomore feature. Barbro Kollberg and Birger Malmsten play two lonely young strangers who sleep together, feel a connection, and strive to build a life together. Bergman’s decision to have his omniscient narrator—known only as “Man with umbrella”—appear as a character in the story lends a whimsical hue. It presents a biting exposé of the hypocrisy in contemporary Swedish society but never feels cynical. The courtroom finale had me cackling with glee.

The opening shot of a freighter sailing into port under lightning-streaked skies looked so artificial, I wondered if it was intentional.

A lesser Bergman effort sees upper-class Malmsten blinded in a military accident. During his recovery, he inspires lower-class Zetterling to pursue an education. She falls for him, but their class divide proves too large an obstacle. Time passes. Malmsten slides further down the social ladder, while Zetterling ascends. A chance meeting reunites them. You can see where this is going.

Port of Call proffers a social outrage drama akin to Bergman’s earlier It Rains on Our Love, but lacks that film’s sense of whimsy. Jönsson charms as a troubled factory girl desperate to escape her life, but I struggled with Eklund as a dock worker who can’t forgive Jönsson’s past. His stoic countenance through most of the film borders on opaque, robbing his talky, emotive third-act tirade of its impact. Given the similarities to It Rains on Our Love, this feels like a step backward for Bergman.

Bergman’s first feature from his own screenplay. An ambitious movie-within-a-movie following a writer, played by Malmsten, who falls for a prostitute, played by Svedlund. Bergman proffers a dark—bordering on nihilistic—point of view throughout and flexes his formal muscles in an extended dream sequence. The result didn’t resonate—the dream sequence felt pretentious—but I appreciated the uncompromising vision. The scene where Malmsten and Svedlund laugh at a silent film’s inanity to escape their own misery proved a standout.

Slice-of-life drama follows Eva Henning and Birger Malmsten as a young couple trapped in a dysfunctional marriage traveling by train home from Italy. Both convince in their roles, but I couldn’t summon any empathy for their characters. Henning in particular irritated me—a credit to her performance. The film also digresses—via flashbacks and cut-aways—to the couples’ former lovers, who prove just as unengaging. The claustrophobic photography contributes to the sense of entrapment. An accomplished telling of a grating story.

To Joy concerns two promising violinists, played by Stig Olin and Maj-Britt Nilsson. He’s ambitious and frustrated. She pursues him. The two marry, have children, but drift apart as Olin fails to achieve his dreams.

Director Ingmar Bergman disowned this clumsy spy thriller, preventing a proper home video release, and forcing me to watch it on YouTube. Good thing. I would have regretted spending money on this turkey.

Maj-Britt Nilsson plays a dancer reflecting on a coming-of-age summer romance with Birger Malmsten. A small, quiet film buoyed by fearless performances, beautiful cinematography, and a script that conveys the joy of young love without feeling reductive. The ending underwhelmed, but I respect the choice.

A portmanteau comprising the stories of three married women awaiting their husbands at a summer cottage.

Ingmar Bergman arrives. In Stockholm, teens Harry and Monika work dead-end jobs. A chance meeting leads to a date. Romance blossoms between dreamer Harry and free-spirit Monika. But a fight with her drunken father forces Monika to flee her home. Soon, Harry and Monika decide to quit their jobs and run away together in Harry’s father’s boat. They find paradise in the Stockholm archipelago but said paradise proves short-lived.

I tend to dislike circus movies, for the same reason I dislike circuses. Too much broad artifice and force-fed spectacle. But director Ingmar Bergman’s picture harbors no romanticized notions of circus life. His story sees a tired ringmaster and his mistress treat each other with shocking cruelty as each struggles to escape their lifestyle.

Add a star if you speak Swedish. Subtitles lose comedic timing. Ingmar Bergman’s acerbic comedy about a gynecologist seeking to reunite with his estranged wife struck me as talky and middle-of-the-road. I bought the performances but struggled to connect with the humor.

Ingmar Bergman’s slow-build drama focuses on two women. Susanne owns a successful modeling agency but yearns for her former lover, a married man. Younger Doris models for Susanne, has split with her fiancé, and yearns for a more attentive partner. We watch both women realize their dreams in a meandering but uneasy manner. Then Bergman strikes. He punctuates both storylines with profound moments of icy, acerbic cruelty that disabuse both women of their fantasies. The reductive epilogue disappointed, but there’s a through-line here to Neil LaBute’s best work.

Entertaining albeit frustrating comedy-drama period-piece from writer-director Ingmar Bergman.

The movie where the knight plays chess with Death. Time has rendered the once iconic imagery almost comical. Indeed, throughout much of the first act, I couldn’t shake an unintended sense of amusement as the production’s Gregorian chants, smoke-filled sets, and chain-mail costumes evoked Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But critics hold writer-director Ingmar Bergman’s film in high esteem for good reason. Starting with a scene in a tavern that begins innocent but turns dark at a rapid pace, the film gripped me.

Ingmar Bergman’s story of a lonely old man revisiting the events that hardened him reminded me of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, minus the supernatural aspects. Victor Sjöström convinces as the lead, but the pat ending felt disingenuous.

Ingmar Bergman directs this story of three women sharing a maternity hospital room. The monologue-laden script lacks visual action. Bergman compensates by filling the screen with close-ups and the performers rise to the challenge. Still, the trite ending underwhelmed. Eva Dahlbeck’s final collaboration with Bergman.

Set in the mid-nineteenth century, Max von Sydow plays Vogler, a traveling mute magician who opens the film arriving in a small town with his assistants. The local elites waylay the party, intent on prosecuting them for their own selfish reasons. But Vogler proves more cunning than they anticipated.

While not the first rape-revenge picture, The Virgin Spring proved a direct influence on Last House on the Left and its countless imitators. But director Ingmar Bergman isn’t interested in the visceral revenge thrill exploited by those remakes. He’s more concerned with the aftermath—of survivor’s guilt and rationalizing brutal violence. And of the never-present God facilitating the perpetual cycle.

An officious judge investigating a supposedly indecent theatrical performance unleashes self-destructive impulses in both himself and the three avant-garde artists under scrutiny.