"The utopian imagery of Mozart's opera has pervaded Bergman's recent films; the 'ideal' couple Tamino and Pamina, united in the dawn of enlightenment and triumph over adversity, have haunted his angst-ridden couples since Hour of the Wolf. Made for Swedish TV, his film of the opera itself was obviously intended to popularise it. His strategy was to stage it in an 18th century theatre, complete with quaintly spectacular stagecraft, in front of a modern audience looking like delegates from a UNESCO conference; he introduces a few backstage gags, and lots of audience reaction shots, but mostly just films close-ups of the singers (doing their stuff in Swedish, incidentally). The trouble is that Bergman's ostensibly supportive tactics tend actually to subvert Mozart's conception, and so the result is a good deal less momentous than Bergman thinks. But it's still much livelier than most TV versions of operas."


"Ingmar Bergman's mounting of the Mozart masterpiece is appealingly conventional—it's less an interpretation than a simple presentation. As such, it plays reasonably well, despite the crude blocking and the hideous zooms that became the main feature of Bergman's style after Scenes From a Marriage."


"Bergman's effervescent film of Mozart's sublime opera is, with Smiles of a Summer Night, one of his major comic works and also one of the finest film operas—even though the Swedish cast and musical director Eric Ericson, conducting the Swedish Radio Choir and Symphony Orchestra, were little known internationally. Bergman visualizes it as a highly artificial stage performance presented to a rapt audience—and this fancy-drenched tale of a quest, a princess, a beau, the Queen of the Night, the Masons, the sexual wars, three lads in a balloon and irrepressible Papageno leaves you almost dizzy with delight."