"An old myth retold by Ingmar Bergman: the story of the knight who cheats Death, one of the loss of faith, of redemption, of the triumph of innocence in the person of the holy fool and his young family. Although one might expect doom and gloom, there is comedy and great beauty, but mixed with a feeling of relentless fate. The shot of the dead reeling across the horizon in a macabre dance, though seen only briefly, must be one of the most famous images on film."

"My favorite of Ingmar Bergman’s many great films. Funny, romantic, and profound, it is the most perfect period costume dramedy. “Love is the perpetual juggling of three balls: heart, mind, and body,” says Eva Dahlbeck as the aptly named actress Desirée Armfeldt. Tell me about it! Gunnar Björnstrand is great as the unbearable lawyer Egerman, playing against the delightful trio of Swedish actresses Harriet Andersson (beyond cute), the aforementioned Dahlberg, and Ulla Jacobsson. A good entry into the world of Bergman for anyone who is expecting dark meditations on mortality."

"When I first watched “Pain and Glory” it called to mind the work of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, who, like Pedro Almodovar, continuously displayed their ability to fuse their own lives and art, taking elements from their personal experiences and creating a world with rich and complicated characters. Nowhere has Almodovar’s talent as a director been put to such excellent use as in “Pain and Glory.” Clearly his most personal and best film to date, it is a contemplative triumph, rich and elegant yet intimate and subtle…"

"I spent my moviegoing life avoiding Ingmar Bergman movies. A few glimpses of The Seventh Seal or Persona made me think they were not accessible. I also knew Woody Allen worshipped him, so surely they were over my head. It was while working on my Ikea-sponsored web series Easy to Assemble that I thought: Well, if I’m going to be satirizing Swedish culture, I should watch some Bergman. He became the director from whom I have learned the most. He gave me the courage not to shy away from pain, which is the core of all comedy. The results are apparent in “Finding North,” an episode in Easy to Assemble’s third season, and all my writing since. I chose Wild Strawberries because in it I found the key that changed my work forever. I always lived in a daydream, where sometimes things felt real and sometimes they felt imagined. So much of an actor’s life is imagination. Wild Strawberries is a road-trip movie about an old man who looks back at his life, his loves, his regrets, and has to face certain truths about himself. The story is not revealed by flashbacks, though. It’s revealed by going from reality to daydream. He reflects on his past with a nostalgia for childhood. This makes reality feel more present and his relationship with his grown son and daughter-in-law more uncomfortable. Have you ever been in the presence of someone having an argument and thought, I can’t believe they revealed that to me? That is every scene in a Bergman film! After his wife died, Bergman said, “I was in a room built of my own sorrow.” No other sentence expresses the pain of losing a loved one in such a poetic way. His words are so revealing, and coupled with the right emotions, the right images, they bring me as close to the human experience as anything I have experienced in a film. There is another reason Wild Strawberries has a special place in my heart. In 2013, because of my involvement in Easy to Assemble, I was cast in a Swedish-American show called Welcome to Sweden. I like to imagine that Bergman had a hand in that. I shot a scene with Lena Olin in which we picked wild strawberries. It was not imagined, though. That really happened!"

"Interrupted by the arrival of the talkies, the oeuvre of Victor Sjöström remains one of the summits of silent cinema. Even if we no longer pay too close attention to The Wind, despite it having been regarded for so long as one of the masterpieces of film history; as also the lesser known The Phantom Carriage, despite it having been a foundational inspiration to Ingmar Bergman, who watched it ritually every year; and even if he is most often remembered for his role in Wild Strawberries; Victor Sjöström is the auteur of a visionary and profound body of work, that makes him equal to his great contemporaries Dreyer and Murnau. For my part, it is The Outlaw and His Wife, inspired by the true story of an 18th-century Icelandic outlaw played in the film by Sjöström himself, which has left the most indelible mark on me."

"The first one is Wild Strawberries by Ingmar Bergman. It’s what I saw when I was 15, and it showed me that films could be something more than just entertainment or going and staring at girls in the cinema or whatever, but film could have the kind of weight of a book or something like that. I used to be a big reader, and I loved going to the movies, but I had no sense of taste in the movies. You know, I grew up in a suburb of London, and I went to school in the middle of London, and that’s when I found myself, one wet afternoon, in an arthouse, and there was Wild Strawberries, and that, for me, was the beginning of it all. It had so many ideas, and it played with dreams, and I thought, “Oh my God. This is quite something.” So it really was a kind of major event in my life."

"Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece was an international critical and financial success, winning four Oscars. And that was in its truncated, just-over-three-hour version. Included in this set is Bergman’s full version, made for Swedish television. Presented in four parts, it comes in at over five hours, nearly twice as long as the theatrical cut. It’s truly a marvel to behold, intricately detailing every aspect of the lives of the Ekdahl family in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden. As it brilliantly charts a span of several years through the eyes of children, the film is equally detailed with its adult characters’ points of view. Equal parts joyous and tragic. A marvelous and loving tribute to Bergman’s life in the theater. Full of magical realism and stark, painful reality. A meditation on death and a celebration of life. Dickensian in nature (Dickens is said to have been a major influence on Bergman for this film). Truly unlike anything else he ever did. It recalls the great epics of David Lean, which were massive in scope while also being concerned with intimate details of the human condition and its fragility. A masterwork in either version. Watch them both and never be bored for a moment."