Who payed the critics

People are voting emotionally.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It may sound strange, but my advice is to see the shorter version first in order to fully appreciate this. Being a "love it or hate it" type of movie, only then you can decide whether the longer version is worthy of your time or not. I've seen the shorter version first and it left me hungry; it clearly feels rushed and incomplete; there are many moments that don't seem to interconnect very well. I admit, the cutting could have been done better for the shorter version; it feels too abrupt and affects the overall pacing. Nevertheless, it fueled my interest for the four-part miniseries; I wanted more details! Just as I anticipated, the longer version is clearly superior because of the extraordinary character development and the inclusion of many key scenes. It really feels that Bergman gave the very best of him and "squeezed" all his inspiration into the making of this movie. Everything here is extremely colorful and rich-textured. Indeed, the cinematography and dialogues (especially monologue scenes) are very reminiscent of the works of Andrei Tarkovsky. I must add that there are many semi-horror moments throughout the movie.

I saw the 6 hour 20 minutes long super extended cut for this movie. Movie which I've been planning to watch for years, but have always pushed the box set further and further back behind the front shelves. Now that I finally decided to give it some 7 hours of my life and watch it, I can't do much more than feel sick due to how much I wasted my time watching this garbage, and how much shorter it could've been. This is basically Downton Abbey for people who prefer their movies "smart" and "tedious" so they can say the exact opposite from what really happened and act like there is something much deeper and complex and philosophical beneath the surface while the movie itself is actually so shallow and fragile even scratching its surface destroys the whole work because all it has is its shell. But wait, maybe this is why it is so smart and deep. It is so shallow and fragile, just like life itself. Very smart and deep and philosophical, would give 10/10 and call it a masterpiece because that's definitely what this movie is and not something I'd just use to justify my rating for it and call myself smart for liking it. In a way, this is the predecessor of the movie Boyhood (2014). That movie is known as the most mediocre movie ever made, but also has metascore of 100/100, just like this movie. The main difference between these titles is that Boyhood can even mildly make the viewer identify with the main character's life and his problems there were Fanny and Alexander live their life in completely different type of mediocrity in a different time period, in a different world, which, based to this movie, is so boring I can't help but wonder how these people managed to die off for natural causes and not just kill themselves during their depressive boredom.

Released in 1982 in a 5-hour version for Swedish television and cut to 180 minutes for theatrical release, FANNY AND Alexander was meant to be Ingmar Bergman's last film. Though the great auteur lived on another 25 years and even wrote and directed some smaller projects, FANNY AND Alexander can still be seen as a great capstone to decades of legendary cinema.FANNY AND Alexander deals with the great two preoccupations of Bergman's career, namely the absence of God and the unbridgeable gaps between human beings, but the result is wonderfully life-affirming. Fanny and Alexander are the children of Oscar and Emilie Ekdahl, actors in Uppsala circa 1907, but the film gives a panorama of the extended Ekdahl family, presided over by grandmother Helena, uncles Gustav Adolf (a restaurateur and the film's most comedic presence) and Carl (a professor who has fallen into debt and is trapped in a loveless marriage), their wives and children, and the selfless Jewish shopkeeper Isak Jacobi. This Swedish family lives in an Old World opulence that is hard to believe for audiences today, especially for a country whose class system by and large disappeared after the war. The rigid interaction among people not closely acquainted and the deference of servants to their employers make for gestures as alien to us 21st century viewers as a Noh play.In a way, FANNY AND Alexander is like those big novels of a century ago, by Tolstoy or Galsworthy, dealing with the vicissitudes of a whole family. The vaster family drama, however, is only a backdrop to a more personal one: Fanny and Alexander are soon orphaned, and their widowed mother eventually remarries, this time with a cruel clergyman. The children move from the freedom and comfort of the Ekdahl home to the austere bishop's place, where the children are punished for the slightest infraction by beatings or being locked up in the attic. The Ekdahls' torment living under the bishop is the great crisis of the film, and their unexpected liberation from it presents Alexander with a burden that he will carry into his budding manhood.The original television version is the way to see Bergman's final masterpiece. Don't be daunted by the length: 5 hours should not be a problem in an age when people will watch an entire season of a sitcom on DVD in one sitting. FANNY AND Alexander is not slow, meditative cinema like, say, Andrei Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr, but rather Bergman is always presenting the viewer with some engaging little drama. The theatrical cut, which Bergman made only with the greatest regret, is a very different (and much weaker film), cutting out much of the film's magical realism, the touching meditations on growing old represented by the character of the grandmother, and some vivid depictions of early 20th-century Sweden.

In Fanny & Alexander, those two characters are basically side-characters. Or at least they feel that way because I still have no idea who they are. The same can be said about everyone else. Even though the viewer never really gets an idea who all these people are, we're supposed to care that one man bursts into a depressing rant all of a sudden, another man dies, a woman starts screaming in the middle of the night, the widow finds "true love" about 5 minutes later, a boy is haunted by his dead father... The movie is full of these events that have an extremely high impact on the young minds of these two children. But why should I really care when those two children are presented as empty shells throughout the whole movie? And why should I care when the whole movie is depressing?