"Ingmar Bergman's latest theatrical feature is an emotionally draining tour-de-force which probes the souls of four women and effectively sums up the thematic concerns which have obsessed the Swedish director throughout his career. Bergman's impeccable direction, the visually sumptuous colour production, and the teaming of three of the top femme performers from the Bergman troupe should draw critical raves for this harrowing study of anxiety and death, and make it a potent arty attraction in urban keys."



"Bergman first presented this film in screenplay form in The New Yorker. It is remarkable to see how exactly he realized his vision, how little was lost in translation. For it is style that elevates this masterwork, lends it its incredible intensity of feeling and extraordinary sense of intimacy. A montage of ticking gilded clocks serves as a kind of collective time bomb, slicing precious seconds off the dwindling lives of all the women. The fluid, totally controlled weaving of Sven Nykvist's camera catches breathtaking shots of white-robed heroines in classic attitudes and lets the mood of panic gather force without technical impediment. Bergman has stated that his films are essentially emotional experiences, and Cries and Whispers stands as his ultimate argument. That this magnificent movie had difficulty finding an American distributor reflects the sad decline over the past decade of this country's interest in serious work by the best foreign filmmakers."



"I find this cold and sterile work because, for all its patient training to perfection, it contains nothing that enlists or informs me. Ask what Bergman seeks to convey about relationships and you are handed one of those Renaissance charts of emotional physiognomy—how to depict lust, greed, avarice, terror, sloth, etc. There is more to life, and more to art, than this sort of dexterity."



"Is the whole film the masterpiece is has been called? Will its horror—for it is a film of horror—compose with time into a durable reflection of life? True that at the end Bergman lets himself come nearer than even before to a kind of reconciliation with living. But I can't help suspecting that his women, monumental creatures, will stand outside the human race."



"The film positively ticks with clocks but, perversely, they are there to lift it out of time, not to nail it down. Again, just as the track is a carefully wrought complex of cries, whispers, ticks and tocks, so the visual impact of the film is extravagantly sophisticated: the clothes, the decor, the colour. Above all, the photography, by Sven Nykvist, is of surpassing beauty. But what is all this techniculture doing in a film about aboriginal despair? Why is all the horror so exquisitely persuasive? And if the earth is dark and dirty we must take it on trust, for the only stain which is allowed to spread across the perfect tastefulness of all things visible here is blood. So much pleasure seems a strange accompaniment to the expression of so much pain."



"Ingmar Bergman has capped his career with a magnificent achievement, a film that should be seen by anyone willing to submit himself to a chilling, haunting, wrenching experience. Cries and Whispers is enriched by Bergman's vast experience in manipulating the technology of film; more than that, it is infused with his humanism. It is a warm, rich, lush movie, burnished with the heat of the reds and golds of the setting, yet held tensely between the whites of the women's bedclothes and the blacks of death and despair."



"You can interpret Cries and Whispers through a whole religious metaphysic, and no doubt Bergman himself would; but latterly this has been something of a red herring for a director whose talent lies more in straight psychodrama. None of the films immediately preceding have been more visually seductive than Cries, so much so that form, repeatedly, gets the better of content. Mostly Bergman is able to regain control, which is where the scenes that make the film come in: for instance, the short sequence where Thulin, in period costume, is undressed by her maid, which says all there is to say about clothes, disguise, repression. Cries is about bodies, female bodies, in extremity of pain, isolation or neglect (the cards are heavily stacked). Karin (Thulin) mutilates her cunt with a piece of broken glass and, stretched out on her marital bed, smiles through the blood she's smeared across her mouth at her husband in a celebration of a marriage that's a 'tissue of lies.' Maria (Ullmann) finds herself lacking a thread that would tie her irreversibly to life. Bergman's hour remains resolutely that of the wolf."