It should be enough to say, by way of recommendation, that no one who has followed Ingmar Bergman this far in his career will want to miss out on this comprehensive reprise of his themes and obsessions. With that said, it can next be said that the attempted summary of forty years of filmmaking is a taller order than any single, coherent, well-balanced work can be expected to fill -- even a work three and a quarter hours in length. If this length seemed to be necessitated simply by the career-long accumulation of material to be covered, there would be reason enough for complaint; but there are plenty of times when the length seems not to be so necessitated, when it seems instead to have been determined by such principles as decide the "suitable" size of a park statue or grave marker. One wonders, then, how many viewers have found the three and a quarter hours easier to endure, even to savor, under the threat of Bergman's widely broadcast pronouncement that this movie would be his last. With Ewa Froling, Bertil Guve, Pernilla Allwin, Erland Josephson, and Harriet Andersson. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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