- Critic Score
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100Powerfully, painfully honest.
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100If it's not an actual masterpiece, it's at least the next best thing, a fully characteristic, fully alive work by a master of his art.
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100Its leisurely, deliberative style is a perfect complement to the emotions it deals with - emotions so penetrating that I warn you at the outset how jarringly intense you may find Bergman's most brilliant drama in decades.
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100One could literally milk a thesaurus in trying to find the right words to lavish on Saraband: brilliant, towering, majestic, challenging, remarkable.
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100Bergman has never been an ordinary filmmaker, and what he's given us is no genial last hurrah but rather an intensely dramatic, at times lacerating examination of life's conundrums that is exhilarating in its fearlessness and its command.
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100Saraband makes for a powerful and poignant final roar from the grand old man of cinema--the movies' lion king.
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100Bergman's Saraband is sublime.
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100It would be difficult to identify a single frame in Saraband that is not a distinguished composition in itself; Bergman has the eye of a latter-day Vermeer.
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91A joy to watch.
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88Saraband portrays a sad vision of aging, yet the film is never depressing. For those inclined to search for psychological twists, the film offers plenty of Freudian situations capable of provoking lengthy discussions.
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88Builds slowly and naturally to an unbearable personal crisis.
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80Ms. Ullmann, now 65, and Mr. Josephson, 81, have a supreme mastery of the Bergman style. Their performances are spiritual and emotional X-rays.
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80With Saraband, the great writer-director has stepped back into the ring for one last epic wrestle with his demons. There is, as always, no easy outcome. But no one ever fought for higher emotional and spiritual stakes.
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78A pure distillation of the great director's ongoing themes of the frailty of the human psyche and mankind's willful inability to accept the inevitable, whatever that may be.
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75This is as bitter and despairing an exploration of the human spirit as any of Bergman's films, and it is just as vibrantly written and directed.
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Saraband -- the term means an erotic dance for two -- is like watching four people take turns trying to swim with one of the others clinging to an ankle. It's grim and gripping.
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75Bergman has not gone soft, not emotionally, philosophically and certainly not artistically. This is as tough a film as he has ever made.
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75Bergman's creation of family banter that turns irredeemably cruel remains without peer.
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75Anyone expecting a tender sunset elegy, however, has wandered into the wrong film. Saraband, despite a few wistful moments, is a poison pill of a reunion.
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70If ultimately the highly talky Saraband comes across as a minor entry in the canon, it nonetheless marks a dignified farewell for one of cinema's greatest directors.
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70A rare, unexpected treat.
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70Saraband doesn't ask to be considered prime-cut Bergman, and it isn't, although its slightness may not matter to the art-film starving class.
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70A bitter but finally moving story about lost love, hatred between generations and a curious kind of liberation, Saraband officially closes one of the most prestigious and influential careers in the history of cinema.
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70The screenplay of Saraband feels concocted, not absorbed from life in sense and soul like so much of Bergman's work.
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63Saraband, flat and static both visually and thematically, doesn't begin to approximate the austere beauty of the director's art-house classics.
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60Insightful as ever but a little dated in the set-up and treatment of the shooting.
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60This uneven new film, a series of dialogues from the legendary Ingmar Bergman, is assembled like movements of a concerto.
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58Feels like the effort of a tired artist reworking the same themes.
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50The performances are perfectly distilled, but the traits I dislike in Bergman are all here -- self-pity, brutality, spiritual constipation, and an unwillingness to try to overcome these difficulties.
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RobertS.9
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Dr.Suess4Bergman can do so much better than this.