Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1966 • Sweden
Starring Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson
By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical PERSONA, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women undergo a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Performed with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by Sven Nykvist, the influential PERSONA is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.
Up Next in Sight and Sound Critics’ Poll: Greatest Films of All Time
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Seven Samurai
Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1954 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko TsushimaOne of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, SEVEN SAMURAI (SHICHININ NO SAMURAI) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to pro...
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The Passion of Joan of Arc
Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer • 1928 • France
Starring Renée Falconetti, Eugène Silvain, André BerleySpiritual rapture and institutional hypocrisy come to stark, vivid life in one of the most transcendent masterpieces of the silent era. Chronicling the trial of Joan of Arc in the hours leading up...
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Late Spring
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu • 1949 • Japan
Starring Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji TsukiokaOne of the most powerful of Yasujiro Ozu’s family portraits, LATE SPRING (BANSHUN) tells the story of a widowed father who feels compelled to marry off his beloved only daughter. Eminent Ozu players Chishu...
