Ingmar Bergman’s Best Movies Ranked: The Definitive Ranking

Again, not a Top Ten. It's a Top Seventeen. So, I'm good. As I came to the end of the Criterion Collection's box set, I realized that I had written a lot of 4-star reviews. I went back and counted, and there are seventeen of them. Seventeen of thirty-nine films received 4-star reviews. That's incredible.…

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Fanny and Alexander

#7 in my Ranking of Bergman's Best Films. This is the sum total of all of Ingmar Bergman's film knowledge he had accumulated over decades, starting in the 1940s. It's his longest and most sophisticated work both visually and narratively. It gets the adjective Dickensian used to describe it quite a bit, and it fits…

Autumn Sonata

#13 in my Ranking of Bergman's Best Films. Autumn Sonata fits so well into Bergman's filmography in a couple of different ways, and it's amazing in the way that much of Bergman's late career was amazing. There's nothing showy about the film (though it is certainly visually sophisticated and adept). There's nothing grand about it…

Brink of Life

#5 in my Ranking of Bergman's Best Films. I've been waiting for this. Out of the 39 Bergman films in this set, there had to have been one movie that I had never heard of that I would end up loving as much as Bergman's best stuff, and it finally happened. Brink of Life is…

Waiting Women

1952. Bergman was past his studio phase, but he hadn't quite hit the point in his career where he was "Bergman", art house darling. He was writing almost everything he directed at this point, but no one outside of Sweden knew he existed, and even in Sweden he wasn't that famous or even financially successful.…