Film

Fanny and Alexander

Name: Fanny and Alexander
Genre: Fantasy, Drama, Mystery
Released: 1982
Cast: Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Jan Malmsjö, Ewa Fröling, Gunn Wållgren

Bergman's warmest and strangest film is really two stories fused together: a lush, sensory celebration of a theatrical family's Christmas abundance, and a gothic fable about a widowed mother remarried into cold, punishing austerity. Ghosts, puppets and God all wander through it. At three hours it asks patience, but it repays every minute with images you won't shake.

TMDb rating

7.8

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An old man's road trip through memory and regret, gentler and shorter than Bergman's later work but carrying the same fascination with family, guilt and ghosts of the past.

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Fellini's own autobiographical childhood memoir, riotous and sentimental and strange in exactly the way memory is. Same appetite for excess, same tenderness underneath the chaos.

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Something you would not have found on your own.

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A boy's coming of age inside a world of performance and illusion, soaked in nostalgia for childhood, art, and the adults who shaped him. Warmer and more openly sentimental.

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