Rating: 
Summary: Haunting
Review: I first saw this film when it was released in 1972. Everyone on campus was excited--a new Bergman film was an event in the arts community there. So I trooped along, a merry teenager, to see my first Bergman film.Oh my. The opening scene was unlike anything I'd ever seen, even in a foreign film. The first scene opens on Agnes (played by Harriet Andersson) waking up in pain and thirst. She is obviously dying, and taking her time about it. The opening minutes are some of the most extraordinary in cinema. The harshly sunlit room points up the transparency of Agnes' skin, her parched lips, her ravaged frame. The camera moves in tight for closeups (which is a testament to the makeup artist for this film.) Agnes' awakening seems far more real than the studied mannerisms of her sisters Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin.) Maria is a silly goose, and Karin is a dour disciplinarian. They are caught in lifeless marriages. Each seeks escape in one form or another. But there is no escape from their sterile lives or their ties to their sister, who must represent their souls which are as parched and dead as Agnes'cancer-riddled body. This is one of the most unforgettable, if depressing films I've ever seen. Only Kurosawa's "Enkiru" comes close to it in subject manner, and it is a walk in the park by comparison. For sheer film excellence and uniqueness, "Cries and Whispers" stands alone on a frosty mountain peak. Best seen with a box or two of tissues and some kind of anti-depressant.
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable!
Review: I recently purchased the Criterion Collection edition of Ingmar Bergman's 1972 masterpiece Cries and Whispers. It's been a week since I watched it and the movie has not left my mind. The story is simple. Two sisters, the puritanical Karin and the animalistic Maria, have come to their sister's isolated estate to care for her. The passionate and loving Agnes is dying. Cries and Whispers is Bergman's first color feature and it is a fine film. The intense colors play a major role. They represent years of human anguish, suffering, hatred, nausea--the Cries and Whispers of a lonely creature abandoned by its Creator. Its symbolism is subtle and its characters are incredibly real. The film is emotionally-overwhelming. It is a difficult film which asks for toleration and rewards its audience with the only thing great art has to offer--reconcilliation with death. There isn't much I should say about the DVD itself. Criterion's digital transfer is magnificent. There is an interview with Bergman--his first in years--conducted for Swedish television. I watched it twice and fell in love with this artist whose surprising belief in an afterlife we forgive him. He is afterall, dying.
Rating:
Summary: Like watching a fevered dream!
Review: In lesser hands, "Cries and Whispers" would be laughable, its characters considered stereotypes, its style pretentious. But genius is at work here--among the director, his gifted actresses and his cinematographer. Agnes, the spinster sister is dying of (ovarian?) cancer--not tuberculosis, as has been misstated here--in a fin de siecle manor house. Ticking clocks slice precious seconds from her life as her sisters and a devoted maid attend her final days. The film is comprised of focused sequences, punctuated by close-ups of each of the four woman that dissolve into blood red as the "cries and whispers" of their psyches haunt the soundtrack. These sequences are part reality, part memory, part fantasy and part projection of feelings the women have for (and against) one another. There are individual scenes of brilliance: the self-loathing Karin having layer after layer of contricting victorian clothing stripped from her body; the frivilous Maria being forced by her former lover to confront her true self in the mirror; Anna comforting the dead Agnes in a startling pieta; the estranged Karin and Maria coming together briefly in a ballet of faces and caressing hands accompanied only by a lone cello playing Bach. You leave this film feeling you've been taken somewhere you've never been before. And it's one of the few times I'd recommend seeing the English-dubbed version; it was excellently dubbed by the original actresses under Bergman's direction. This version allows you to fully absorb the sumptuous visuals without having to read subtitles. The Criterion DVD lets you choose which version to watch. One complaint: For some reason, the concluding Swedish "end note" has not been translated into English. The film ends with the following on a field of red:"And so the whispers and cries die away."
Rating:
Summary: Lies and sisters
Review: Loved It! IS THIS THE FILM THAT TURNED ME ON TO FORIEGN FILMS. But it should not be classified as a FOREIGN film. Our worst fears about death, our selfish thoughts of how others pain as our pain is explored. Like a mirror, this film shows us our own ugly reflection. It is the story of three sisters, and a servant girl. One sister is dying, as the other three women wait on her. The performances are out-standing, my favorite is Bergman-regular Liv Ullman. There are reflections of the past, a need for answers and redemption. It will ruin our day, but we'll be better because of this cinematic triumph. It is very important to experience this picture, (The dvd has an opinional ENGLISH-dubbed soundtrack)it might make you feel better about your life and family. Sven Nykvist's Oscar-winning Cinematography is haunting, beautiful, and makes characters out of every color. RED is very dominant and even sticks with you long after the film is over. This is a masterpiece, a bit of truth and pain rolled up in a film.
Rating:
Summary: Superb
Review: Of Bergman's films, Cries and Whispers is his second best. Persona should still be considered the director's greatest acheivement and am hoping that it will soon make an appearance in the Criterion Collection. But this in one of the best movies ever made. Very few films can be so completely devoid of humor and compell the viewer to watch as intently. (Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc comes to mind as another). The story centers around the death of Agnes and her memories, as well as the lives of her two sisters. To say that Bergman is an actor's director is an understatement. Liv Ullman gives a performance on par with the one turned in on Persona. Every actor in the movie, for that matter, gives a great performance. Sven Nykvist's cinematography is astounding. Soft dissolves to red bubble up on the screen to accent the internal strife of the characters. A clock ticks achingly slow to perpetuate strife and highlight the temporality of life. This movie is truly sad in a way that is real--not culled from some cheap sentimentality. I would not even consider watching this movie if you are emotionally unstable.
Criterion has done wonderful work with the transfer. I thought the video version looked pretty good; this version blows me away with its beauty. It offers the option of watching the movie in dubbed or subtitled version. The dubbing is very good. Bergman directed the dubbing in English and had the original actors dub their parts. This is truly a movie where pictures and colors tell the story, and watching it in the dubbed format allows one to focus on the images a little more. Excellent. Well worth the money. I would always like to have a commentary throw in, and a lot of Criterion films do, but this does not take away from the excellence of this edition.
Rating: 
Summary: a contrary opinion
Review: Okay first off, I am trying hard to watch these older movies with an open mind. I loved Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries was good too. The camera work in this movie is great, I'll give you that. This is the third movie I've seen of Bergman's and I must say I was dissapointed. It seemed like he was out to shock his audience for the most part. With themes of lezbianism, incest (I don't know how those Sweeds are with their touchy feely stuff) and horror. Some of the shots did remind me of the exorcist, like dark halls, etc. The sick sister's lip smacking (my pet peeve) in the begining of the movie was highly annoying. How about getting a better sound man? The caracters were all grotesque looking. I watched this movie because I liked Bergman's other two films I mentioned, and to see Ingrid Thulin. She looked so beautiful in Wild Strawberries. Her nude scene in this movie was completely gratuitous. Be warned! There is a very disturbing/shocking scene in this movie that will upset some more sensitive types. It comes right after the nude scene. I think this movie could have been so much better and I think people are rating it high just because it was made by Bergman. I must say I was probably expecting a warmer more introspective movie because of my previous experience. I think he over did it with the red. Too obvious a device. What can I say that was good about this movie? The performances were all good. The camera work is quite good. Buy it? Nah. Watch it? Only if you REALLY love Berman and Sven Nyquist's camera work and pseudo-horror. A classic? No! Come on people.
Rating:
Summary: Bergman at his best
Review: The first Ingmar Bergman film I ever saw, it ranks amongst the top of his works. The story, inspired by an Edvard Munch painting, takes place in a large, desolate house, where two sisters and a nurse take turns in taking care of the sweet sister, Agnes, who's been ravaged by cancer. As Agnes, Harriette Andersson gives the film its soul. As Maria, Liv Ullmann paints a portrait of child- like vanity and hollowness. Ingrid Thulin as Karin, is the stern cold and unfeeling sibling, but inmersed in guilt by her inability to show love. Sven Nykvist's cinematography is breathtaking, as always. And Bergman's direction is flawless, and ultimately, heartbreaking.
Rating:
Summary: More shattering than any horror film.
Review: The masterpiece of his most variable decade, 'Cries and Whispers' is Bergman at his most simple and direct. Although a costume drama, it is as stripped down as 'Fanny and Alexander' is ornate. The deliberately unreal, austere setting against which the four female leads exist, as well as the uncluttered costumes, create a rigid tableau effect, broken only by spurts of zoom or jerky camera movements that are as quickly broken off. The film makes great play with the colours red and white, some critics finding this gynacological mise-en-scene misogynistic, right down to fade-outs steeped in blood-red. Certainly, in the first scene, a harrowing close-up on Harriet Andersson in bed, her face disfigured by unthinkable pain, it is difficult to tell whether she's self-pleasuring, menstruating or in dying agony. But although the film's imagery is direct, Bergman's narrative - two sisters and a maid await the death from cancer of the heroine, each looking back at a (generally negative, even horrific) sexual past - is as convoluted as ever. The film opens with an astonishing visual symphony of images symbolising dawn and time, a prelude to this story about women who live in a domestic, interior, 'female', timeless time, apart from the real world. Their 'revenge' on this situation, if you like, is to demolish the certainties of 'reality' - time and narrative become displaced by dreams, visions, imaginings, delusions, fantasies. Even the integrity of the flashbacks, which seem to do so much to reveal charater, are called into question by later information. Once again with Bergman, genuine physical pain is contrasted with psychic fragmentation, serving to break the coherence of the plot, out of which seep only cries and whispers, the unspoken but persistent horrors and silent Francis Bacon screams that comprise life for most of us.
Rating:
Summary: An Extremely Memorable Film Experience
Review: There are two things that will always stand out to me about this film, which stands amongt the first rank of Ingmar Bergman's monumental body of work. Two things, I mean, above and beyond the expected brilliance of the writing and acting. Another reviewer complained about Liv Ullman's natural warmth being choked here by an unexpected characterization. One could just as easily say that it's precisely the choking of one's expectations that Bergman was aiming for, except I think that's stretching things. Quite apart from what someone thinks Ullman should act like, her performance in this film is as harrowing as all of the other sisters. The first most memorable element of the film is the way the camera is used to characterize the three sisters. Long shots are used for the cold and distant sister, while intense close-ups are used for Ullman's intensely intimate sister. And, as one might expect, middle shots are used for the sister who holds a compromise position between these two extremes. It's not necessarily the case that this kind of filmwork is unprecedented. What makes it so amazing is how Bergman makes it completely natural, even as it is a wholly artificial, even schematic, way of filming the proceedings. There are countless other parallels in the movie (notice the wine and the eating of fish for example), but somehow he manages to create an easily "read" filmic language that at the same time is not so blatantly artsy or obvious that it becomes intrusive. The schematic nature of the cinematography is matched in the screenplay as well, where the "symbolic meaning" of the three sisters (for example, severe asexual versus unbridled hedonist) manages to be felt, and felt as completely natural, without seeming like a bunch of symbolic pawns marched around the screen for our intellectual entertainment. It is very rare to find such an ideal marriage of form and function, and it is one of the true joys of the film to behold. The second most memorable element of the film is its overall meaning, for want of a better term. The film, shot entirely within interiors, is relentlessly grim. In addition to all of interpersonal trauma being inflicted, the center of it all is the dying sister, who succumbs to disease with truly harrowing intensity. But not even death brings relief for her, since instead of dying she continues to live on in some kind of inexplicable and frightening undeath. When a priest comes to pray for her soul, his faith breaks before our very eyes in an incredibly moving speech and he begs the dying sister to tell him if there is anything beyond the grave. And as the whole narrative slumps toward utter despair, suddenly we are outside for the first time in the movie. This memory of a bright, radiant summer afternoon, with all three sisters smiling and alive together, is voiced over with words to the effect that all of the horror of existence and dying may be redeemed by one solitary moment of perfect happiness. Now, reject this notion or not, it is a profoundly startling and effective ending, and shows brilliantly how art cannot help being life-affirming, cannot help but to overcome even the cruelest of jokes, the human condition, by turning the vacuum of meaning that would engulf us into the pure and breath-taking vision of art. It is this fact that elevates it from fine to profound, and has ever since left an indelible impression upon me.
Rating:
Summary: BRILLIANT, DISTURBING EXPLORATION OF HUMAN FRAILTY
Review: There was such a buzz of excitement and curiosity about this film during its initial U. S. release that I would have given almost anything (at age 12) to sneak off and see it. No such luck; I would have to wait another 12 years for the video version and, in retrospect, am glad to have had the extra years. Some of the images in this brilliant collage of thoughts and dreams are far too disturbing to take in as an adult, let alone in childhood. As is the mark of a true classic, CRIES AND WHISPERS grows richer and more meaningful upon each repeated viewing (as do PERSONA, THE PASSION OF ANNA, and SHAME--other classic Bergman entries during this period of his epoch). The meanings of the flashbacks begin to gel in our minds and connect with some of the sisters' subsequent behavior (or not) and the painful, earthbound reality of death and its horrors has rarely been more poignantly portrayed in film. Much credit goes to these wonderful actresses: the legendary Liv Ullmann, whose physical beauty is transcended only by the grace and dignity of her soul; the difficult but finally endearing Ingrid Thulin; the strength and dignity of Harriet Andersson as the dying Agnes--a performance of overwhelming power and conviction that, inexplicably, was absent during the awards seasons. But, finally, it is the dreamlike authority and insinuation of Bergman's camera that stays with us, scenes so initmate and personal we begin to feel voyeuristic, almost apologetic for watching. Two scenes are most memorable for me: the dying Agnes lying against the maternal breast of housekeeper Anna in a Pieta-like pose of unbearable sadness and the final dream/memory sequence of Agnes remembering a time when she and her sisters were happy and at peace in their mother's garden. The camera lingers on the luminous Harriet Andersson as she wistfully gives grace to her life, "which gives me so much". If those words and the expression on that actress's face don't inspire the deepest, most profound gratitude for the medium of film (and Bergman the Master), I don't know what will. Most highly recommended.
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