"The mind that Bergman reveals in this film is one corrupted by despair, tormented by human cruelty, seeking salvation in a kind of simple good-heartedness that would be despised in a lesser artist. Perhaps these very features make him a man of his time; perhaps the very confusion of symbols is a relief, being such a rich source of theorising for anyone who likes to construct theories. Whether any of the solutions offered represents Bergman's own intention or not, or whether that intention is communicable at all, is another matter. He is a supremely skilful setter of crossword puzzles. If only we could be sure they had an answer."


"At a time when so much kindness, tolerance and security has gone out of life, when faith has been at its lowest ebb for centuries, it is not surprising that the stark and relentless quest of an uncommercial director like Ingmar Bergman should make such a unique impact on the cinema. There is nobody quite like him. He is cruelly unsentimental, yet shows deep human sentiment. He has the rapt wonder of a poet, yet is fully conscious of the bustling, bourgeois world around him. He hangs on to youth and life, yet remains preoccupied with old age and death. He is austere, yet accessible; lauded, yet lonely; sophisticated, yet wild...and one is reminded of these paradoxes more strongly than ever in Wild Strawberries."


"The construction testifies to a supreme skill. It is no longer a question of the classic game between present and past, but of total interpenetration of past and present without one being the temporal reference of the other, and in connection with which one can't not evoke Proust, and for certain sequences, Joyce."


"If any of you thought you had trouble understanding what Ingmar Bergman was trying to convey in his beautifully poetic and allegorical Swedish film, The Seventh Seal, wait until you see his Wild Strawberries....This one is so thoroughly mystifying that we wonder whether Mr. Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say. As nearly as we can make out—and, frankly, we found The Seventh Seal a tough but comparatively lucid and extraordinarily stimulating film—the purpose of Mr. Bergman in this virtually surrealist exercise is to get at a comprehension of the feelings and the psychology of an aging man....Mr. Bergman, being a poet with the camera, gets some grand, open, sensitive images, but he has not conveyed full clarity in this film."


"I cannot begin to detail the apt and lovely devices by which Bergman conveys this excursion into a man's spirit. Its evocations are never pretentious, never sentimental—though often tender and usually painful. It is a ruthless lyricism that does not despair. Wild Strawberries is the testament, I suspect quite directly personal, of a man who thoroughly understands how terrible it is to be a human being, and who is glad to accept the consequences. The screen has never been used with greater art or for more humane ends."


"The central idea of Wild Strawberries is that a man in his late seventies—a distinguished professor—may in the course of twenty-four hours learn more about being a decent soul than has ever occurred to him before, but the point is never quite conclusively developed. Even though Mr. Bergman introduces us to dreamlike sequences in which, after the manner of Kafka, nightmares are presented with unsettling twists of logic, the fact is that the symbolism and night and thoughts sometimes add up to nothing more than confusion."


"The conception of Wild Strawberries is roughly parallel to Joyce's Ulysses, with Bergman's protagonist on this Biblical odyssey, like Joyce's, the total man—husband, lover, father, son, poet, laborer, man of thought and man of action, inhabitant of past and present, with mankind's weaknesses and strengths—who, at the end of this ninety-minute film, is presented to the observer, complete. Bergman's achievement in Wild Strawberries is far too complex to be briefly summarized, but the conclusion, when the old man reaches through time to clasp the hand of the charming girl who represents man's aspirations, and weeps over the realization of his loss, is as moving a moment as the screen has ever recorded. The film is frequently harsh, cruel, and finally beautiful, its unforgettable final image, a couple sitting on the river bank, the man's fishing pole forming a perfect arc into the still water, represents Bergman's most personal statement, a comment which is passionately affirmative."


"Moving, of an erudite simplicity, here is one of the masterpieces of the most important postwar filmmaker (with Fellini). Dream and reality, present and past, love and death unite for a lesson of wisdom. One does not often find such a splendor of serenity."


"An archetypal Ingmar Bergman film, and one of his best. An aging professor (Victor Sjöström, who as a director was Sweden's D.W. Griffith) making a long journey by car takes the opportunity to rummage through his past, wondering for the first time what kind of man he was. There's a lot of allegorical baggage on board, but the film's virtues lie in its relative simplicity."