"Ingmar Bergman's festive and full-bodied dream play—a vision of family life as a gifted boy might have perfected it, replacing his strict family (Bergman's father was a clergyman) with a generous-hearted theatrical clan. In what Bergman said would be his final movie, his obsessions are turned into stories, and he tells them to us—he makes us a beribboned present of his Freudian-gothic dream world. The movie is scaled big; it runs for 3 hours and 10 minutes, and its lovingly placed warm gingerbreading is enormously enjoyable. But the conventionality of the thinking in the film is rather shocking. It's as if Bergman's neuroses had been tormenting him for so long that he cut them off and went sprinting back to Victorian health and domesticity."

"Bergman's magisterial turn-of-the-century family saga, largely seen through the eyes of a small boy and carrying tantalizing overtones of autobiography. Perhaps more accurately described as an anthology of personal reference points, designed as an auto-critique analyzing his repertoire of artistic tricks. Years ago, in The Face, Bergman was agonizing over the humiliations of the artist caught out in his deceptions and manipulations; but Fanny and Alexander cheerfully acknowledges his role as a charlatan conjuring his own life into dreams and nightmares for the edification or jollification of humanity. Here again are the smiles of a summer night (transferred to a dazzling evocation of traditional Christmas celebrations), the terror of the small boy harried by a sternly puritanical father, the crisis of religious doubt, the apocalyptic materialization of God through a glass darkly (but seen this time to be only a marionette). Pulling his own creations apart to show how they tick, Bergman demonstrates the role of art and artifice, occasionally slipping in a stunning new trick to show that the old magic still works. Certainly the most illuminating and most entertaining slice of Bergman criticism around, even better in the uncut TV version which clocks in at 300 minutes."

"I conceived Fanny and Alexander during the fall of 1978, a time when everything around me left me in darkest despair. But I wrote the screenplay during the spring of 1979, and by that time many things had eased up. Autumn Sonata had a successful premiere, and the whole tax business had dissolved into thin air. I found myself liberated suddenly. I think that Fanny and Alexander benefited from my relief. To know that I had what I had."

Olivier Assayas and Stig Björkman: "Bergman—the need to trust one's emotions"

Royal S. Brown: "Video Review: Fanny and Alexander"

Michiko Kakutani: "Ingmar Bergman: Summing Up a Life in Film"

Frederick J. and Lise-Lone Marker: "Why Ingmar Bergman will stop making films"