Autumn Sonata

Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (1978) brought together, for the only time, cinema's two great Bergmans: the director Ingmar and the legendary star Ingrid, in her final film role. The collaboration earned Ingrid Bergman an Academy Award nomination, and the result is one of the most piercing dramas ever made about mothers and daughters.

Ingrid Bergman plays Charlotte, a famous pianist whose self-absorption has scarred her daughter Eva, played by the director's frequent muse Liv Ullmann. Confined largely to a single house over one night, the film is a duel between two extraordinary actresses, shot by Sven Nykvist in warm, lamplit close-up, as buried grievances surface in waves of accusation, guilt and longing. In one famous scene Charlotte 'corrects' her daughter's playing of a Chopin prelude, and a lifetime of wounding is laid bare in a few minutes.

Bergman spent his whole career on emotional cruelty within families, and here it takes its starkest form; casting the two Bergmans together gave the film the weight of an event. Harrowing and still humane, Autumn Sonata is essential late Bergman and a fitting farewell to one of the screen's greatest performers. Its unflinching study of maternal damage has shaped the chamber drama of family reckoning ever since, and few of the films that followed it have matched the force of its two central performances.