Cries and Whispers – Review

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I still remember my first exposure to the work of Ingmar Bergman very vividly: many would find themselves starting with one of his more well-known works like The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries but for me that introduction to a masterful body of work was Cries and Whispers. I still remember the look on my face as I was taken in with the horrors of his limited use of space, just as I was with the overcome present from his use of the colour red. As far as critical success is concerned, this may indeed be Ingmar Bergman’s most well-known on the count in spite of its polarizing of Swedish critics, it was the work that garnered Bergman his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director as well as a nomination for Best Picture. If this were supposedly “lesser Bergman” on some standards (I view it as one of his best), then it only reaffirms his stature as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

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Wild Strawberries – Review

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Wild Strawberries is such a conundrum of a film for someone like myself to talk about. There’s so much that happens within the course of Wild Strawberries‘s relatively short running time of 91 minutes which overwhelms the human emotion. The first moment in which I saw Wild Strawberries left me questioning the course of my life together with what I believed in, and I had not revisited it ever since because the concoction of my own expressions left me in a state, almost depressed yet I learned something more. This is something I highly admire Ingmar Bergman for, as no matter what he chooses to tackle, I always find there’s something worthy of being engrossed in. This is how I define a life-changing film, for it still managed to leave me in as much awe as it did on my first viewing. Continue reading →