Fanny and Alexander

Ingmar Bergman announced that Fanny and Alexander would be his final theatrical feature, and although he continued to make films and television afterwards, this 1982 work is rightly regarded as his summation. It won four Academy Awards including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography (the latter for Sven Nykvist's extraordinary work), as well as the Golden Globe and the BAFTA in the same category. The 188-minute theatrical cut and the 312-minute television version are both available; both reward the time.

The story of two children, Fanny and Alexander Ekdahl, caught between a warm theatrical household and a cold, authoritarian bishop stepfather, draws openly on Bergman's own childhood under his clergyman father. The first hour is one of the warmest sequences in Bergman's filmography, an Uppsala Christmas of 1907 staged with the abundance of late-Renaissance painting. Then the family's matriarch dies, the bishop arrives, and the film moves into the gothic register that has made certain sequences indelible.

The film weaves theatre, dream, ghost story, and family chronicle into a single meditation on imagination as survival. Bergman called it his most important film, not his best, the distinction feels exactly right. Allan Edwall as the patriarchal Oscar Ekdahl, Pernilla Allwin and Bertil Guve as the children, and Erland Josephson as Isak Jacobi are part of the great Bergman ensemble at its final flowering.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Bergman's farewell, the rare late-career film that consolidates a director's entire body of work and finds new generosity in it. One of the warmest works ever made by an artist usually associated with austerity.