"Though edited down (under Bergman's supervision) from a six-part series originally made for TV, this remains an exhaustive study of the doubt, despair, confusion and loneliness experienced by a woman (Ullmann) when she learns that her fickle husband (Josephson) is having an affair. Bergman, as in Face to Face, is here at his most stylistically stark: very little actually happens (much of the film consists of conversations in rooms), so that it's left to the performers (all superb, and mostly framed by Sven Nykvist in revealing close-ups) to bring the litany of pain to life. And they do, with the result that the film is an uncompromisingly harrowing and honest account of male-female relationships."

"It's a movie of such extraordinary intimacy that it has the effect of breaking into mysterious components many things we ordinarily accept without thought, familiar and banal objects, faces, attitudes, and emotions, especially love. A smile is a composite of pain, anger, affection, and creeping boredom. The surface of a double bed is a linen battleground. Later the rumpled white sheets suggest an abandoned Arctic landscape on a planet in a universe that might be contained within the head of a pin. In Scenes from a Marriage, Mr. Bergman is examining the molecular structure of a human relationship. You think you've seen it before, but every time you see it, it's new, which is one of the things about love. Like a laboratory model of a molecule, the design is complex and beautiful in a purely abstract way, but the film is also intensely, almost unbearably moving."

"Ingmar Bergman's marathon made-for-television examination of the gradual breakup of a placidly 'successful' middle-class marriage has been edited down to around three hours, and it shows its reassembled status rather badly. Still, it features moments of searing insight, thanks largely to Liv Ullmann as a woman for whom 20 years of marriage and divorce are barely enough to come to terms with her own rigidity. Bergman's screenplay leaves nothing to the imagination and turns the film into a windy soap opera most of the time; what might have been a masterpiece in the TV original (although I doubt it) becomes in its truncated form mostly elegant mush. Disappointing."

"All in all, Scenes from a Marriage was a pure joy to make because we approached it as a television production and made it without feeling the paralyzing pressure of making a feature film."