"The cruelty Bergman sees in his male characters is, he leaves no doubt, a form of confession; the compassion and understanding he sees in Marianne, Karin and the unseen Anna is a form of hope. With Saraband, the great writer-director has stepped back into the ring for one last epic wrestle with his demons. There is, as always, no easy outcome. But no one ever fought for higher emotional and spiritual stakes."



"Saraband doesn't ask to be considered prime-cut Bergman, and it isn't, although its slightness may not matter to the art-film starving class. His style may date, but that's another way of saying it has been indispensably assimilated into our ideas of what profound, thoughtful cinema is supposed to be. Like a wedge of low-grade Stravinsky, revived and performed, the movie could be considered an addendum to a looming and unique catalog, in which no work is insignificant."



"Mr. Bergman's psychic world is an unchanging Scandinavian twilight, saturated in deep music (here it is Bach, Bruckner and others) that invites contemplation and evokes tormenting dreams of an elusive spiritual peace. As ever, women are the salvation of men. They alone have the capacity to forgive and empathize, even after their terrible mistreatment at the hands of the opposite sex. And men, no matter how accomplished and feted by the world, remain hard-bitten patriarchal taskmasters vainly striving to rule their pitiful little fiefs."



"The screenplay of Saraband feels concocted, not absorbed from life in sense and soul like so much of Bergman's work. It is as if someone had merely summoned elements—tormented people, mainly—that would make a script in Bergman style. It produces little of the customary awe we feel because he has plumbed what are, or could be, our secrets. Still—a word that here is richly freighted—the making of the film in itself gives us a last glimpse of a genius."



"Some critics have dismissed Saraband as uncinematic, but it's absolutely not. It simply works within extremely tight limits: you're always aware of the space on which each scene is performed (a library, a church, a study) even when you can't see much of them. Bergman offsets the claustrophobic feel with a few sparing effects for emotional punctuation: a suddenly slamming door, a few inserts of surrounding countryside, a dash of expressionist lighting for Johan's climactic dark night of the soul (it's a Bergman film: there has to be a dark night of the soul). It's a sombre and commanding valedictory."



"With its sprawling and far from symmetrical plot, Saraband, made in 2003 for Swedish television, is stark and economical, with a small cast of characters and sparse rural settings, and it seems like an apocalyptic endgame in terms of Bergman's own career—the end of the world as he knows it. It was shot in digital video, and at Bergman's insistence is being projected as such—and his peculiar use of that medium is what makes this work compelling. I wouldn't dream of contesting Bergman's status as a film master. But I find a neurotic spitefulness and puritanical narrowness in the films he made after the 60s, and I think one would have to be as misanthropic as Woody Allen or critic John Simon to consider him the greatest of all filmmakers....The performances are perfectly distilled, but the traits I dislike in Bergman are all here—self-pity, brutality, spiritual constipation, and an unwillingness to try to overcome these difficulties. The mise en scene is masterful, but the indifference to visual style seems to border on contempt, an attitude that's most apparent in the graceless, abrupt flashbacks and in the lap dissolves to images of characters as soon as they're mentioned in the dialogue. Like low-budget camp icon Ed Wood, he seems to lunge after obvious content at the expense of any stylistic finesse—it's as if he doesn't see video as an artistic medium and can't be bothered to try to make it so. Yet as I watched Saraband I began to wonder whether he was simply refusing to make the ugliness of the content look attractive—and suddenly that same content became startlingly honest and lucid."



"For many (if not most) moviegoers, Saraband will be considered too artsy, too minimalist and too controlled to qualify as enjoyable entertainment. But this has always been the case with Mr. Bergman, particularly in his early years of international-film-festival exposure with revelatory works like Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957) and Wild Strawberries (1957). As these and subsequent masterpieces kept pouring out of Sweden to the world's cultural centres, Mr. Bergman gradually redefined and revolutionized the concept of fashionably 'serious' cinema from the socially conscious films created by the Italian Neorealists of the 40's and early 50's to more private, existentialist dramas examining the inner life of the individual in a world without God....If Saraband should indeed turn out to be his final film, he has concluded his career triumphantly with a work of genius."



"Saraband is not what might be expected from a venerable director with six decades of experience who will turn 87 next week. But Bergman has never been an ordinary filmmaker, and what he's given us is no genial last hurrah but rather an intensely dramatic, at times lacerating examination of life's conundrums that is exhilarating in its fearlessness and its command....The most remarkable thing about Saraband is that Bergman makes this kind of intensely emotional filmmaking look simple. The ease with which the director calls forth the most deep-seated and complex emotions from his actors is helped by their skill and the decades they've worked with him, but it's nevertheless exceptional....Seeing Saraband also reminds us how much we're missing by not having pictures like this as part of our regular moviegoing menu. Bergman's style of filmmaking seems to come not from the last century but rather another universe altogether, one that we've abandoned, to our loss."