"If there is a large degree of self-indulgence, even the suspicion of self-parody, in much of the generous sprawl of Fanny and Alexander, such criticisms are rather outmanoeuvred by its special, holidaying status. It is less than a summa and Bergman has made better, more integrated and satisfying films. But it is at least the sum of its parts and many of these are magnificent, signally the camera virtuosity of Sven Nykvist, whether catching the city's dark turbulent river (a kind of punctuating image) or clusters of torches in the night, or required to capture a gamut of past styles, everything from the gothic of Hour of the Wolf through the gut-velvety reds of Cries and Whispers to the gaiety of Smiles of a Summer Night. Bergman's little worlds congregate into a big-screen pleasure for the senses."


"'A declaration of love for life.' Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman's new film, is that and more. Bergman adds that it is 'the sum total of my life as a filmmaker,' declaring it his last film in a career henceforth to be dedicated to theatre. A charming, expansive, exhilarating film, it is a masterpiece. In his forty-third feature as writer-director, the Swedish master comes out of his dark decades of intellectual despair and moral anguish into the light of humanism. The metaphysical probings, philosophical speculations, psychological analyses and, more recently, cold outrage at the cruelties and alienations of contemporary life have been set aside. Now Bergman has turned to his personal and professional past to provide a glorious, glowing celebration of human beings and of the sweet things in life....This is a film to revel in for its joy, its warmth, its breadth of mind, and its depth of feeling. Like Fellini's Amarcord, Bergman's Fanny and Alexander is not only the sum total of a career; it encompasses and refreshes our lives."


"Like many summings-up, Fanny and Alexander is heavy with purpose, 'eloquent,' overexplicit, and even a bit banal. Bergman lays out his values in clear opposition: Among the good things are extended families, food, sex, generosity in all its forms, theatre, magic, painting, and Jews; among the evil are small families, austerity, chastity, unkindness, masterfulness, and Protestant bishops. It is not one of Bergman's great films, yet it inspires gratitude, for along with the obviousness there is much power and an infectious pleasure in spinning out stories. The movie goes on and on, undisciplined, prodigal, a potpourri of themes, obsessions, and styles, encompassing both the decisive events of family history—births, deaths, marriages—and the ticking of a clock, a servant's desultory kitchen chat, the giggle of a nursemaid flirting with the master."


"Even as you watch Ingmar Bergman's new film, Fanny and Alexander, it has that quality of enchantment that usually attaches only to the best movies in retrospect, long after you've seen them, when they've been absorbed into the memory to seem sweeter, wiser, more magical than anything ever does in its own time. This immediate resonance is the distinguishing feature of this superb film, which is both quintessential Bergman and unlike anything else he has ever done before. Fanny and Alexander is a big, dark, beautiful, generous, family chronicle, which touches on many of the themes from earlier films while introducing something that, in Bergman, might pass for serenity. It moves between the worlds of reality and imagination with the effortlessness characteristic of great fiction."


"It may still be too early to designate Fanny and Alexander as Bergman's The Tempest, but he is very near the point when lyrical reverie somehow supplants the most tentative gesture of dramatic conflict. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Fanny and Alexander as irretrievably schematic or sentimental. As in all of Bergman's films, there are in Fanny and Alexander a multitude of privileged moments and incisive observations that only Bergman can provide. No matter how hard his characters try to fit into their period costumes, they can never erase from their expressions the gleam of modernist afterthoughts. The singleminded intensity and formal rigour of a Dreyer or a Bresson have never been Bergman's strong suits. With Fanny and Alexander we see more clearly than ever that Bergman's oeuvre has always been the proper province less of the theologian than of the psychoanalyst. Bergman remains one of the few genuine grown-ups ever to make movies, and we need him now more than ever."


"Ingmar Bergman announced that this 197-minute film from 1983 would be his last theatrical feature (though it is actually, like Scenes From a Marriage, the condensed version of a much longer television series). It is less an autumnal summation of his career than an investigation of its earliest beginnings: through the figure of ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), Bergman traces the storytelling urge, developing from dreams and fairy tales into theater and (implicitly) movies. The film doesn't so much surmount Bergman's usual shortcomings—the crude contrasts, heavy symbolism, and preachy philosophizing—as find an effective context for them. Tied to a child's mind, the oversimplifications become the stuff of myth and legend. As in Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a realistic psychological drama is allowed to expand into fantasy; the result is one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films."


"This is a virtuoso piece of film-making in which many of the director's most persistent obsessions are drawn together. It's at once a meditation on childhood, a celebration of theatrical life, a nostalgic evocation of turn-of-the-century Sweden, a portrait of a family, and a film about a boy (Alexander) coming to terms with the death of his father. Moments of high comedy (the uncle farting on the stairs) are interspersed with vicious, Strindberg-like rows between couples and scenes of grief. No character is one-dimensional. In the puritanical and sadistic priest, Bergman creates a figure as chilling as any children's villain, but even he is not portrayed in an entirely unsympathetic light."