Popular reviews

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  Review by karsten ★★★★ 15

  While Schrader's film was heavily influenced by this I think they're on two completely different pages. For one, this doesn't have a magical mystery tour. Secondly, I'm tired and am gonna go to bed, actually.

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 2

  "Suffering is incomprehensible,
  So it needs no explanation."

  And neither does this film.
  It shouldn't be explained.
  It should be experienced.
  Possibly Bergman's finest.
  A cinematic crisis of faith.

  That letter.
  Those eyes.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 4

  I am going to ramble until I make sense of my thoughts on this:

  It is no coincidence, I think, that the one person in this film to have a deeper understanding of Jesus and his own faith does so through open compassion. Algot, who is apparently physically disabled, dismisses the physical pain of Jesus in favor of the spiritual and emotional pain of being abandoned, citing it as the more severe form of pain suffered during the Passion. His insight into Jesus' suffering is in contrast to the faithless and broken Tomas, who has failed (in a manner that is, to me, a personally devastating manner) to reach out with compassion to anyone (in the course of the film).…

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  Review by Robert Beksinski ★★★★★ 2

  Lying beneath the arches and mosaics of the moderately decorated architecture, the dusty half empty pews, and the flooded natural sun leaking down over the congregation is a clandestine struggle quietly waging war within us. In a Bergman film, this is merely setting the stage.

  Winter Light is an example of a perfect film, at least in the Bergman vocabulary sense. For a film designed almost in a theatrical concept for its minimalism, it remains largely cinematic, and achieves a great deal over the course of a hour in real time and only an afternoon in film time. In the space between morning congregation and afternoon ceremonies, the lives of a small group of individuals is tested in the most…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 4

  89/100

  As the light reaches in through the windows, those who pray cower in their respective pews. Although the sun shines, everyone understands that the outside world is one of shivering bitterness and modern gasps of fear. Clinging, clinging, clinging to someone who will listen, quietly hoping for a reply within the shattered chambers of the church. The silence gives way to hardened spouts of regret and anguishing periods of hopelessness, but then again, does that even matter when one still happens to listen and the snow continues to descend?

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 24

  God is going. Winter Light is a very personal film for Ingmar Bergman, whose father was a priest. It's a very small scale film, even for Bergman, but about the largest of all things: God and creation itself. Made in the 1960s, Winter Light slots into an era when Bergman spent years making thematically connected films, as opposed to the somewhat unpredictable genre jumping of his late 50s output (religious - The Seventh Seal, social realist - Brink of Life, historical - The Magician, sentimental drama - Wild Strawberries). Winter Light is the middle and best of Bergman's Silent God Trilogy (or Faith Trilogy), and grapples with faith on a very powerful individual level.

  Scandinavia, like much of Europe, has turned increasingly secular…

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★ 40

  "I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing." (John 15:5)

  Second part of the auteur's trilogy dealing with man's relationship with God. It is literally impossible to relate with this masterpiece's protagonist unless you are a son of God. "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." (John 1:12)

  What is so absolutely accurate and brilliant about the movie is the fact that it states how agnostics, atheists, etc. lose their credibility in God based on the actions of humans, not…

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★★ 16

  "You'll hate yourself to death."

  Firstly I realize I'm watching this out of season so to speak, but as a grumpy versifier once said, "April is the cruelest month". On the heels of the vacation psychodrama Through a Glass Darkly, Ingmar Bergman continued his informal trilogy of spiritual agony with the tremendous Winter Light. And once again Bergman regular Gunnar Björnstrand is forced to take one for the proverbial team by playing a hollow protagonist who is unable to convert his piteous insecurity into constructive empathy. In fact it's almost as though someone told Bergman that Through a Glass Darkly was a bit too sanguine, leading the master of the morose to proclaim, "Oh, you want it darker? Hold my…

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  Review by BananaPudding ★★★★ 4

  Local pastor having an existential crisis while simultaneously being an asshole for 80 minutes, a great way to spend your time if you want to feel miserable. Shit rocked

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★½ 35

  “Winter Light” is a cry out to God that reverberates back only as a hollow echo in a vacant cathedral. 

  Ingmar Bergman’s second entry in his Trilogy of Faith is marked by its emptiness. While the Almighty did not make a personal appearance in its precursor of “Through a Glass Darkly,” the absence was filled through familial affection.

  God was present through love; however fallible that, too, can be. 

  In “Winter,” love is a word said only to an blank wall, a desecrated icon. It is difficult to judge which bears more pain; faith or adoration. Ultimately, it is only possible to say - life itself can bear nothing, except for constantly breaking one down to an essence of nothingness. …

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  Review by spap1 ★★★★ 15

  we can long, but what is it we are longing for?

  moments of our lives can be spent pinning our hopes upon peace in death, upon a joy that may never come and yet we are merely told to continue on, to distract ourselves with a mind-numbing existence while we face a gradual putrefaction. 

  why do we do it?

  we can just give up, turn to the forests and disappear within them for good, but what would that do? what would that mean? would it not just be a concession to the great mass that attempts to consume us more with every step? 

  to avoid this we must look left, right, up and down, yet not anywhere at all. 

  our…

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  Review by Evan Eaton ★★★★½ 5

  In a mere 80 minutes, Bergman fills his audience with more existential nausea than Schrader did with First Reformed in just under 2 hours. Consider this, then note that Winter Light is more than half a century old, and you should end up with the answer on which is the prevailing film. Even so, given how spiritually bonded these two parables are, it’ll be exciting to sit down and double-bill them some day. Gunnar Björnstrand and Ingrid Thulin give the best performances I’ve seen in a Bergman film yet, their crushing portrayals of pastor and parishioner in love against the odds conjuring all the misery one might expect. Few films articulate the weight of authority to this extent, and silence has never felt so deadly.