Popular reviews

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  Review by Wes ★★★★½ 8

  watching an ingmar bergman movie while you're already in a state of emotional vulnerability is like squeezing lemon juice on your hand thats been bitten off by a shark while youre being set on fire and the shark is coming back for you and he somehow has a gun now

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  Review by Lucy ★★★★ 4

  “come what may, this is happiness”

  grief is so potent. it brings people together with a purpose, some more selflessly than others. and it rips them apart, exposing the truth, however ugly, however foul. bergman always makes me sob

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  Review by kailey ★★★★½ 11

  red is the color of the walls reflected against skin in the candlelight which is the color of blood dripping down your clothes which is the color of your dress as you lean forward with your enigmatic smile which is the color of your anger and your hate which is the color of death which is the color of a small spark between the only two people who can reach out and touch.

  (white is the color of her face as she pleads with her sisters not to leave her alone. white is the color of her dress as she calls them two of the only three people she's ever loved.)

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★ 24

  19/100

  Everything I hate about Bergman concentrated into a single film. The dour humorlessness; the mannered performances; the ticking clocks that infiltrate portentous silences with metronomic reminders of mortality; the overwrought arias of verbal cruelty; the expository flashbacks; the random mood swings designed merely to startle...it's as close as he ever came to self-parody, practically as ludicrous as SCTV's Whispers of the Wolf. And then there's the use of red, which to my eyes goes well past bold into laughably garish. (And I suffer from protanopia*, the variety of colorblindness in which red is severely diminished. If that salon looks like an unhosed abattoir to me, I can't even imagine what people with normal color vision experience.) Honestly, if I…

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  Review by liam f ★★★★½ 2

  why be happy when you can watch this film instead

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  Review by Hunter ★★★★★ 6

  You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest commandment.

  And the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself.

  That last bit there, the part about loving the people around you, is the hardest part. Commitment to ideas and to what is perfect, that's one thing. Commitment to broken people, to people who hate you, and to the ones who are painfully furthest away, that is another matter entirely. Love cannot be imposed or expected, but chosen against all the odds. There is a sadly perceptive irony when the nurse Anna is said to have had it easy while caring for the…

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  Review by Hari Nef 1

  when he says he wants a goth gf this is what he means

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 1

  It amazes me how Bergman recontextualizes the color red. This is not a film fraught with danger, with hellish landscapes, nor a film that is frantic or fiery. It is a film of deep, powerful emotion, but the hue Bergman uses is blood red, a deep crimson that would otherwise suggest horrors. Instead, we get drama. Though there is a hint of supernatural, and though there is a moment of what constitutes Bergman's version of body horror, this film takes the color red and turns it into something other filmmakers would use sepia for.

  It is the color not just of memory, but of emotional moments, and of transition. It takes us from distant memories to the present to not…

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  Review by #1 gizmo fan ★★★★½ 6

  really hard for me to watch this. I was stuck with the image of my brother right before he died, especially the moment in the film where all you can hear are the sounds of her in pain. I miss him so much, but I'm so glad I did watch this. bergman is the master of sorrow.

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★★ 16

  Dungeonskramz #6

  Cinematographer Sven Nykvist's command of colour is as strong as his black and white photography for earlier Bergman films. Cries and Whispers is a film of dominant reds, with white and black serving as secondary colours. Faces are half cast in shadow, these distressed, pain-ridden faces. This is an intimate film at times, but Nykvist's cinematography makes the film feel full of empty space. 

  This is a film of pain and lunacy, of a family filled with lies. The truth is hurtful, and even soft touches and silken kisses can't soothe things. Cries and Whispers is about women in various states, from repressed to flirtatious, and their inability to escape their natural feelings. The performances are so fantastic, taking…

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  Review by Brendan Michaels ★★★★½ 2

  Ingmar Bergman's films have that rare power that all great films have. The power to leave you stunned and speechless. Just like Agnes all we can do is sit down and only hear the cries and whispers.

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★½ 37

  “Cries and Whispers” captures with exquisite beauty perhaps the most vivid moments of revulsion in all cinema. 

  It does this - through depicting the degradation that is the act of dying. 

  Ingmar Bergman’s chamber piece-structured film is, rather, a passion play. It unfolds inside a countryside manor, where two women and their maid watch the third sister’s prolonged, painful passing. 

  The work is a masterpiece on the part of Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist. The scenes set in memory around the estate grounds invoke Impressionism in motion. The majority of the film, which is cloistered inside the bi-tonal rooms of the mansion, is saturated with such red that it would make Mark Rothko weep. 

  But here - is where I…