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BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

disinterested_spectator This would have been a good movie for "Mystery Science Theater 3000" to take up. After all, if this movie is going to have characters stand around not saying very much, and then have them sit around not saying very much, and then have one of them lie in bed dying of cancer and not saying very much, and then have two sisters talk to each other without giving the audience the benefit of hearing what they are saying, the "MST3K" team might just as well have supplied some witty dialogue.I suppose Ingmar Bergman, while making this movie, said to himself, "Boy, all my movies are profound, but I'm really being profound in this one," and I suppose those people who make up the art house crowd shared in that opinion. I mean, what can be more profound than making a depressing movie about the slow, agonizing death of a cancer victim; a maid who comforts that cancer victim by giving her the benefit of a couple of naked breasts; a woman who cuckolds her husband until he impales himself, who then actually asks her to help him (how exactly?); two sisters teasing us with a little lesbian incest; one of those sisters telling her maid to quit looking at her just before she gets completely naked while the maid looks at her; and that same sister picking up a piece of broken glass and shoving it up her vagina so that she can smear the blood all over her face in front of her husband?As for this last, I thought that after she forced the broken glass up her vagina she was going to invite her husband to have sex with her. Normally, such a twisted thought would never cross my mind, but it seemed like a reasonable expectation at the time. If Bergman had put that in the movie, it really would have been profound.

blanche-2 Ingmar Bergman's Cries & Whispers is a story of death, real death and the walking dead, as epitomized by three sisters: Agnes (Harriet Andersson), Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin). At the turn of the century in Sweden, Maria and Karin come to visit their dying sister Agnes, who is in terrible pain from what is probably cancer. Agnes has perhaps a fantasy idea of her sisters, as the last scene tells us. In truth, Agnes is the only one capable of feeling pain; her sisters really don't want to be part of her dying process and are there out of obligation. Only the maid Anna is there to hold Agnes, to touch her, and to love her.Maria's affair hurt her marriage to the sensitive Joakim, and when he stabbed himself and begged for help, she just stood and looked at him. (Evidently he lives, though.) Karin hates her cold husband and what she does to keep him away from her is one of the most shocking scenes in the history of film.We're not told what childhood trauma, what "tissue of lies" of which Karin speaks that has driven these women to lack compassion or empathy; we know only that Maria was her mother's favorite. We don't know anything about the father. There is a homoerotic undertone to Karin's relationship with Maria, which Karin seems to both want and reject.The cinematography in Cries & Whispers in glorious, from the vivid red that is used to punctuate scenes, to the women's surrounds. In one startling scene that resembles a painting, the women sit in different parts of the room -- Maria in white, staring out the window which is framed by red drapes; Karin in gray at the piano, and on a sofa in the back, a dejected Anna. Each is lost in thought; they are miles apart.Later, as Anna reads Agnes' diary, Agnes recalls a walk the three sisters took along with Anna when they first arrived, the three sisters in crisp white with white umbrellas, Anna by their side. Stunning.The overall coldness of the family is downright icy as they talk about Anna at the end. Maria and Karin are unlikeable characters, and one has no sympathy for them. The only sympathy engendered is for Anna's ability to love and accept love in return and for Agnes' horrible suffering. Her suffering, however, ends. Her sisters' suffering will be infinite.A true masterpiece.

Leah Films This film explores existentialism through the physical, emotional, and psychological torture of its characters. When Agnes' two sisters visit the plot thickens as her pain transcends physicality despite the comfort she receives from her maid as all women are forced to confront the shadows that bind them.As one character's pain affects and reflects the others' the director takes the audience on a downward spiral of resentment, hopelessness, and agony. The film's poetic cinematography with it's commendable use of the close-up only heightens the characters' suffering as their beauty contrasts with their exterior and interior reality. Watching this film feels like staring at a well composed painting in motion where each gesture and each moment, whether it be a moment of constant screaming in complete and absolute pain or a moment of silence, sets the viewer in an inevitable state of contemplation.

benitez_azucena Cries and whispers showed us siblings that don't get along are brought together by the death of their sister Agnes. Bergman used the color red brilliantly throughout the film. I believe that the color red not only symbolizes inferiority of the human soul but also the pain each individual character carried. This film also in a way related to the passion of Christ by Agnes' death leading to redemption to her sisters, and by her maid Anna sort of representing May the mother of Christ. Maria (Agnes' most beautiful sister)wanted more attention from her husband but since she received a little bit of attention she searched for it through the doctor. her other sister wanted to receive less sexual attention from her husband so she made herself bleed to see if he would still want to touch her still.