Leonardo DiCaprio investigates the disappearance of an inmate of an island asylum in this mix of detective movie, psychological mystery, and paranoid thriller.
Tag: Max von Sydow
Arnold Schwarzenegger is the original ‘Conan the Barbarian’ on Peacock
Arnold Schwarzenegger was the defining action hero of Hollywood from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, yet before he made his breakthrough, he seem the most unlikely American screen icon to lumber his way up the Hollywood ladder. The former Austrian bodybuilder turned Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia (he retired his crown undefeated) seemed destined to […]
Life, death, and chess in Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ on Criterion Channel
Arguably the most famous of Ingmar Bergman’s films and certainly his most iconic, The Seventh Seal (Sweden, 1957) is Bergman at his most allegorical. Max von Sydow, young and blond and heroic, is a disillusioned knight returned from the Crusades in a state of spiritual desperation: his faith has been shaken by senseless death and […]
Dark theater: Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Magician’ on Criterion Channel
Ingmar Bergman created The Magician (Sweden, 1958), in the midst of his most fertile and prolific period of filmmaking. It’s a chamber drama about a travelling medicine show fronted by a mute mesmerist (Max von Sydow) that enters into a battle of wills with the Minister of Health (Gunnar Björnstrand), a rationalist who considers the […]
Ingmar Bergman recalls the ‘Wild Strawberries’ of youth on Criterion Channel
In Wild Strawberries (Sweden, 1957), Ingmar Bergman takes that most venerable of modern genres, the road movie, and transforms it into the contemplative journey of an aging professor into his unexamined past. Victor Sjöström, one of the great Swedish director of the silent era as well as an actor (and one of Bergman’s heroes), was […]
‘Hannah and Her Sisters’ on Amazon Prime
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Woody Allen’s biggest success of the eighties and his most popular film since Annie Hall, returns the director / writer to the same general territory of modern life and the challenges of sustaining romantic relationships, but this time within the context of family. Mia Farrow takes the title role of […]