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The ex- movie star Mai Zetterling found more satisfaction in directing. In interviews she denied that she is an intellectual, but more intelligent films about male-female emotional politics are hard to come by. Unusually frank and intense, these dramas for the 1960s art film circuit pack a visceral impact — the extreme situations and content disturbed critics concerned with Good Taste. It’s a trilogy of respected works: Loving Couples, Night Games and The Girls.

Three Films by Mai Zetterling

Blu-ray

Loving Couples, Night Games, The Girls

The Criterion Collection 1162

1964-1968 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 13, 2022 / 79.95

Written by Mai Zetterling & David Hughes

Directed by Mai Zetterling

The immensely talented Mai Zetterling began as an actress on stage and film and eventually found herself most satisfied writing and directing. Initially an exotic export from Sweden, she didn’t care for Hollywood but found creative opportunities in England,...

"Here comes my family." The BFI in the UK has revealed a new trailer for the 40th anniversary re-release of the acclaimed 1982 Ingmar Bergman film Fanny and Alexander, a Christmas classic from Sweden. The three-hour long saga of family and humanity first opened in Sweden in 1982, before arriving in US theaters in 1983. Two young Swedish children in the 1900s experience the many comedies & tragedies of their lively and affectionate family, the Ekdahls. "Although Bergman is as attuned as ever to the anguish of life, there is also much that is fondly recalled, from toy theatres and magic lantern shows to family Christmases and favoured relatives." Bergman intended Fanny and Alexander to be his final film before retiring, and his script is semi-autobiographical. It won four Academy Awards when it first opened. The film stars Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Jan Malmsjö, Börje Ahlstedt, Anna Bergman, Gunn Wållgren, Erland Josephson, Mats Bergman,...

Seen from the vantage of 2019, the extraordinary actresses who came to prominence in the films of Ingmar Bergman — Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, and the sunny and anguished, incandescent and heartbreaking Bibi Andersson, who died Sunday — enjoyed a relationship with their director that was rooted in a 20th-century male-gaze ethos. Bergman was famously obsessed with these women: with their faces, their personae, the dramatic possibilities they opened up to him. He carried on off-screen romantic relationships with most of them (including Bibi Andersson), and in his movies he placed them on a grand pedestal of extravagant expression. The pedestal was framed not with a medium or long shot but with a starkly penetrating close-up. You could say that Bergman used the camera to probe their very being.

Yet it may be the essence of the partnership between Bergman, the mythical art-house giant, and the actresses he turned into psychodramatic...

'Fanny and Alexander' movie: Ingmar Bergman classic with Bertil Guve as Alexander Ekdahl 'Fanny and Alexander' movie review: Last Ingmar Bergman 'filmic film' Why Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander / Fanny och Alexander bears its appellation is a mystery – one of many in the director's final 'filmic film' – since the first titular character, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) is at best a third- or fourth-level supporting character. In fact, in the three-hour theatrical version she is not even mentioned by name for nearly an hour into the film. Fanny and Alexander should have been called "Alexander and Fanny," or simply "Alexander," since it most closely follows two years – from 1907 to 1909 – in the life of young, handsome, brown-haired Alexander Ekdahl (Bertil Guve), the original "boy who sees dead people." Better yet, it should have been called "The Ekdahls," for that whole family is central to the film, especially Fanny and Alexander's beautiful blonde mother Emilie,...

40. Night of the Hunter (1955)

Scene: The Preacher on the Horizon

Video: http://youtu.be/9PyNL2ahKwc?list=PLZbXA4lyCtqolaQOAXly96de5FYQlPzqK Just like a few others in this section of the list, Charles Laughton’s brilliant Night of the Hunter isn’t really a horror film, but still sets out to keep the audience on edge. Starring a diabolical Robert Mitchum as a preacher/serial killer Reverend Harry Powell, it follows him as he tries to woo his former cellmate’s widow Willa (Shelly Winters), hoping to learn where he has hidden his bank loot. Powell devises that his children John and Pearl must know, but he struggles to gain young John’s trust. When Willa learns of his plan, Powell is forced to kill her and hide the body, leaving him as sole caretaker of the children, who flee down the river. And then the scene. Having believed they have escaped Powell,...

Elitist and pretentious, or an endangered species? Whatever your feelings, there's no doubt that arthouse movies are among the finest ever made. Here the Guardian and Observer critics pick the 10 best

• Top 10 romantic movies

• Top 10 action movies

• Top 10 comedy movies

• Top 10 horror movies

• Top 10 sci-fi movies

• Top 10 crime movies

Peter Bradshaw on art movies

This is a red rag to a number of different bulls. Lovers of what are called arthouse movies resent the label for being derisive and philistine. And those who detest it bristle at the implication that there is no artistry or intelligence in mainstream entertainment.

For many, the stereotypical arthouse film is Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin was a classic art film from the 1920s and Luis Buñuel investigated cinema's potential for surreality like no one before or since. The Italian neorealists applied the severity of art to a representation...

After doing the rounds on VoD for a few weeks, where many of you will have seen it, Sarah Polley's "Take This Waltz" starts to roll out in theaters from tomorrow, and we can't recommend it enough; it's a messy, sometimes frustrating film, but a deeply felt, beautifully made and wonderfully acted one, and we named it last week as one of the best of the year so far. It is not, however, recommended as a date movie, fitting into a long cinematic tradition of painful examinations of broken, decaying, collapsing or dead relationships.

After all, it's one of the more universal human experiences; unless you get very lucky, everyone who falls in love will at some point have the wrenching experience of falling out of it, or being fallen out of love with. And when done best in film, it can be bruising and borderline torturous for a filmmaker and an audience,...

Scenes from a Marriage

(299 minutes, 6 parts)

Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Written by Ingmar Bergman

1973, Sweden, Sk

It should be intuitive knowledge, that one’s ability to love is often captive to one’s ability to love themselves, to be happy with where they are, where they are going and where they might never end up despite every effort. And as much as love is a feeling, it is also an action, expressed through behaviour – at least this is how its existence is often ascertained; which is often where incongruity exists between one person’s feelings of genuine affection for another and the beloved-in-question’s own perception of these feelings as expressed by the lover’s actions. To complicate matters further, how does one’s own personal disappointments and failures and existential disquiet sour and poison these unspoken exchanges of love? In other words, what do you get when you have...

When I first heard Criterion would start releasing titles from their Collection onto Blu-ray I thought of several of their highest profile films that I would love to see and own in high definition. Obvious titles such as Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Bergman's Seventh Seal, Godard's Breathless, Fellini's 8 1/2 and several others, most of which (including all four I just mentioned) are already available on Criterion Blu-ray. Now you can add one more that immediately came to mind... Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, the prolific director's final feature film and one hell of a film at that. If you're a fan of Bergman's work you simply must own this film as it has everything you've ever found intriguing in the director's work all wrapped into one master opus. While the Criterion jacket calls it the director's "warmest" film there is still plenty of darkness to be explored as the story of...

Fanny Och Alexander / Fanny And Alexander (1982) Direction and Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman Cast: Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Ewa Fröling, Börje Ahlstedt, Jan Malmsjö, Allan Edwall, Gunn Wållgren, Jarl Kulle , Erland Josephson, Pernilla August, Harriet Andersson, Stina Ekblad, Mats Bergman, Gunnar Björnstrand, Lena Olin Oscar Movies Bertil Guve, Pernilla Allwin, Fanny and Alexander By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica: Why Ingmar Bergman's final 'filmic film,' Fanny och Alexander / Fanny and Alexander (1982) bears its appellation is a mystery — one of many in the film — since the first titular character, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) is at best a third- or fourth-level supporting character. In fact, in the three-hour theatrical version she is not even mentioned by name for nearly an hour into the film. Fanny and Alexander should have been called "Alexander and Fanny," or simply "Alexander," since it most closely follows two years in the life of young, handsome, brown-haired [...]...

Ingmar Bergman, 1982

Ingmar Bergman's self-styled farewell to cinema is an opulent family saga, by turns bawdy, stark and strange. For novices who are put off by the director's reputation as a dour, difficult doom master, the film provides a good introduction. But it may also count as the ideal final destination: the picture in which Bergman took hold of his demons and forged a kind of truce.

The plot, in a nutshell, goes like this: two wealthy siblings, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and Alexander (Bertil Guve), grow up in the bosom of a lovingly dysfunctional home. Following their father's death, their mother marries the bishop (a superb performance from Jan Malmsjö) and an Oedipal struggle breaks out between Alexander and his icy new stepfather. Matters are resolved in a devastating final section inside an old curiosity shop in which Alexander is shown "the swift way that evil thoughts can go...

When you sit down to a horror film, you know, at least on a basic level, what you're getting into. Whether or not the movie delivers, what you've been promised, and what you're braced for or looking forward to, are scares. Which is why, when we look back on those truly traumatic movie memories, the titles that come to mind often are not horror films at all.

The most frightening movie moments can arrive out of nowhere, in the midst of where they shouldn't belong, catching you when you're vulnerable -- which is why there are a few alleged children's films on this list. But they can also creep up on you, working a different kind of dread, which is where some of the documentaries included below fit in. Fear is a funny thing. It comes in different varieties, it can work its way on you in unanticipated, and, as our collection here proves,...