"Bergman paints in even richer colours than ever before. No other film director could have created this film with its immense scope. Dramatic, colourful, witty, uncanny."



"A highly skillful passionate virtuoso plays on all strings. A film of great power. This is an uninterrupted kaleidoscope of brilliantly composed pictures—an infinite gallery of fascinating portraits in magical lighting."



"This feature dwells on the question of whether there are supernatural powers or not. Bergman comes to no conclusion, but shows that man is susceptible to the tricks of a magician. Fascinated by happenings for which there is no immediate explanation, man is seduced and made to believe."



"Bergman is here continuing his dialogue on faith and doubt from The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, while he identifies himself (as in Sawdust and Tinsel) with the superficially worthless entertainer. For if everything is not clear in Ansiktet, it is at least apparent that the tormented, searching Vogler stands for something positive, even though he is exposed as a trickster. Perhaps Bergman intends a paradoxical allegory on faith: we see that there is nothing in Vogler, and yet, and yet..."



"[I]t's a safe bet that very few viewers are going to understand everything that Mr. Bergman here levitates and puts forth in his bewitchingly imagistic style. That drunken and dying actor who is found in a haunted woods by a vagrant troupe of medicine-show performers—what does he symbolize What is the esoteric meaning of his seeming to die and then come back to life? And who is that weird old woman who tags along with the troupe? These are a few of the mysteries that rise from the shadows and the glooms of this eerie and Rabelaisian study of the susceptibility of the human mind to the powerful sway of illusion and of the ephemeral nature of Truth. But never mind about those details that may be vaporous and vague. The important thing is that this picture is full of extraordinary thrills that flow and collide on several levels of emotion and intellect. And it swarms with sufficient melodrama of the blood-chilling, flesh-creeping sort to tingle the hide of the least brainy addict of out-right monster films."


"Directed with strength, subtlety and that unique mixture of realism and mysticism that is Bergman's alone. One of the world's great film-makers is here at the top of his form, proving that he has much to say and knows how to express it superbly."



"Bergman wobbles between drama and melodrama, alternates genuine horrors with sham tricks, comic sex with serious sex, and poetry with lampoon. Result is that The Magician is perhaps his least successful film so far. But for every murky symbol, there is a sharp physical image: footsteps become important, a thunderclap almost too real, and shafts of light through the mist startlingly beautiful. With the help of this brilliant graphic technique, a haunting guitar score, and the talented stock company of players who have turned up in all recent Bergman films, The Magician manages to fascinate as it confuses, demostrates that even inferior Bergman is worth sampling."



"By all usable standards, The Magician is a superior film—superior in idea and in execution: if it were not, I would not be thus speculating on it. No one today uses the camera with more individuality or holds the spectator more slave to his will. Bergman is a great artist; also, I suspect, a self-indulgent one. In The Magician, I feel, he has been tempted by misty geegaws to soften his art."



"Bergman provides no easy answers to the puzzles he has concocted, although the 'mysteries' themselves are easily explainable. In fact, they are at times made transparent, and become part of the ghoulish fun. Bergman may be saying that the face of the charlatan appeals to something primitive in man's nature; Vogler may represent the diseased Christ figure, the artist, the illusionist; the overtones for these speculations are all there."



"The house of Egerman [Eager Man] is the most integrated microcosm of the Bergman view to date, where loneliness is immutable except through sex, where faith and science, youth and age, dreamer and doer, master and servant, give back equally fatuous answers to the flux of life, and the artist is eternally importuned for purposes inadequate even to his own incomplete and protean vision."


"Ingmar Bergman currently enjoys a reclame he does not altogether deserve. It is true he is enormously talented. He has an instinctual theatrical sense; a psyche over-burdened with religio-philosophical-poetical ideas and symbols; a bohemian bravado and irresponsibility which enable him to do things more cautious creators merely ponder; and an ability to inspire others to give of their best. But Bergman has not yet made a motion picture in which all the cinematic means are integrated into an effective whole. His films are not finished films, not even first rate ones. But they are fascinating to watch, for they are the impetuous outpourings of a demonic poet, of a mind that has not found itself, but has found the right means for its self-expression (the theatre and the cinema). I have seen The Magician three times and shall see it three more, even though I know The Magician, intellectually, is meaningless, and, emotionally, a bag of old theatrical tricks. Cinematically, it is sheer magic."



"Bergman's script is weak, with a confused and repetitive story and various rich themes never fully worked out. The Face is never much more than a series of dramatic tricks. All the cunning of Bergman and his able cast can't in the end save the film from seeming rather hollow."


"This Ingmar Bergman film isn't a masterwork, or even a very good movie, but it is clearly a film made by a master. It has a fairy-tale atmosphere of expectation, like those stories that begin 'We started out to see the King, and along the way we met…' Then it becomes confused and argumentative. But the mysterious images of Max von Sydow as the 19th-century mesmerist, Vogler, and Ingrid Thulin as his assistant, Aman (Vogler's wife, Manda, in male disguise), carry so much latent charge of meaning that they dominate the loosely thrown-together material. Bergman labels the film a comedy, though audiences may not agree. It's a metaphysical gothic tale, with some low-comedy scenes and some grisly jokes involving an eyeball and a hand. The theme—magic versus rationalism or, if one prefers, faith versus scepticism, or art versus science, or illusion versus reality—is treated too theatrically to sustain such heavy-breathing dialogue as 'I always longed for a knife to cut away my tongue and my sex—to cut away all impurities.' There are times when one would be happy to hand Bergman that knife. He uses a 19th-century setting for the clichés of the 20th-century—the man of science (Gunnar Björnstrand as Vergérus, the physician) is cold and sadistic, etc. Those who worry about the supposed division between emotion and intellect never leave one in doubt about which side they're on."


"Ingmar Bergman's 1958 film operates on the principle that illusion and reality, the darkly irrational and mysterious and the brightly rational and obvious, both possess an enormous power over the soul and mind of man. Set in the 19th century, it is one of Bergman's most tightly structured and frightening films."


"Max von Sydow is Vogler, the travelling magician who provokes the wrath of the literal-minded, snobbish authorities in Bergman's cautionary tale about bourgeois society. Combining satire with some truly ghoulish sequences which wouldn't look out of place in an expressionist horror pic, it's among his most unsettling films."