"Bergman's Face to Face is one of his finest films, the most humanistic and thereby the most accessible, perhaps because it is the most personal. The metaphysician, the mystic, the symbol-laden searcher for spiritual surcease have given way to the man in search of self, of an understanding of the universal experiences that enable us to survive....Bergman's compassion has never before been focused so intently on the female psyche, and no 'Bergman woman' has been so thoroughly realized as Ullmann's is here. This is the step beyond the emotional intuitions of Cries and Whispers, beyond the pragmatic authenticities of Scenes From a Marriage. Fittingly, Ullmann is again complemented, as in Scenes, by Erland Josephson. His Thomas is a man whose bridge to understanding is his own bisexuality, his willing submersion in another's pain. The entire cast, Bergman's repertory company, is equally fine in the clear focus of familiar scenes and in the strangeness of the extended realities of dreams—all created through Sven Nykvist's camera eye, all underlined by Käbi Laretei's exquisite piano variations on the theme of Mozart's Fantasy in C Minor. Bergman has probed the universal soul and led us to face ourselves, at last, with love and comfort."


"The trouble with being an auteur is that, by definition, one repeats oneself; and the greater the oeuvre, the greater the risk. There is quite a nice sequence in Hitchcock's Family Plot, for instance, which palls beside the sublimity of Vertigo. Face to Face opens with credits superimposed over an undulating sea (presumably symbolizing the unconscious), and, indeed, it is less a compendium of Bergman's obsessions than a washed-out revision of his finer works. It is a convincing film, so far as acting and atmosphere are concerned, but it lacks conviction."


"At the centre of Ingmar Bergman's latest, and longest, movie, Face to Face, is a compelling and remarkably detailed performance by Liv Ullmann as a Stockholm psychiatrist breaking down one unhappy summer and attempting suicide. Through her hallucinations (in which she revisits her past, clothed in what appears to be a long dress from one of Miss Ullmann's ghastly Hollywood costume flicks), an association with a homosexual doctor (Erland Josephson), and the loving example of her aged grandparents, she gains the strength to live, and possibly to overcome the frigidity that prevents her building a bridge of love in the cosmic loneliness that engulfs us all. In effect, Face to Face is a reworking in Bergman's later clinical style of that major masterpiece in his late Fifties expressionist mode, Wild Strawberries...I much prefer Wild Strawberries."


"As a case-history, it isn't too unusual. Bergman rests nearly its entire weight on the performance by Liv Ullmann, who pulls all the stops out for what must have been exhausting scenes to play before a camera disinclined to blink, but remains a little too dry-eyed throughout. For those unable to work up much enthusiasm for Miss Ullmann, it's a long haul to the unremarkable explanation that she's like she is because of childhood traumas. But being face to face with Bergman is never comforting, nor wholly predictable, and the story of Jenny has nothing cozy in its conclusion. In a film of shocks, nothing is more chilling than Jacobi's revelation, at the end, that he is going abroad, unlikely to return..."


"Originally made as a four-part TV series and tailored to its present length for cinema purposes, Face to Face is a portmanteau untidily packed with all the familiar Bergman impedimentia (from traumatic childhood memories of being locked in a cupboard to dreams of anguished inadequacy), which starts with several strikes against it: not the least the fact that the anguish loses much of its intensity through being dubbed into a limbo of Swedish-tinted English, in some cases evidently by the original cast. Paradoxically, however, the sense of deja vu aroused by both themes and characters tends to work in favour of the film, rather as though the nightmarish terrors had now been tamed, through repeated exposure of their lair in the dark at the top of the stairs, into familiar—even rather friendly—old ghosts."