So this is another Bergman, intended to be his last film (though he in fact continued doing stuff up until his death, looks like). As it starts out, it follows a wealthy family at Christmas-time in the very early 20th century, as they all gather together, the grandmother, her three married sons, and their children. We see their little foibles and intrigues — the melancholy of the son who is a failure in his career, the wandering eye of the son who chases after a maid — and it looks like it’s going to be one of those movies that satirizes and excoriates the follies of the rich.

But then, after the Christmas festivities are over, the third son, a successful theater-owner and actor, has a stroke and shortly dies, and after scenes of grief and funeral and anger, we move into the second third of the movie, when his widowed wife remarries a bishop, and she and the kids (the titular Fanny and Alexander) go to live with him… and it turns out that he’s stark and cruel and vicious. This piece of the movie is bleak and cold, and when the wife manages to sneak away to see her old mother-in-law, now the lavish surroundings that seemed so decadent and foolish at the beginning seem instead warm and inviting and familial.

From there, there are tense scenes in the bishop’s household, supernatural scenes inside the antique shop of a Jewish friend of the family (and onetime lover of the grandmother), and finally happy reunion (marred somewhat by a vindictive ghost), with a speech that lays out rather nakedly the theme of taking joy in the little life of family and good food and drink. So in the end, it ends up being not a satire of this family at all, but kind of a generous, loving, warts-and-all portrait of their life.

Compared to the other Bergman films on the list, it feels less ambitious — which is a weird thing to say about a 3+ hour movie with a sprawling cast, but it is legitimately much more conventional than Wild Strawberries or Persona or The Seventh Seal. There are still unusual elements in it — the casual ghosts stand out — but it’s much more in the shape of a regular narrative, and its formal experiments seem more muted. I think on the whole, I prefer his earlier works.

But… this is still a major film by a major director, and it feels like it. If it’s more conventional, it’s still not especially conventional; and if it’s willing to engage in a bit more sentimentality than his other movies, well, I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all; it never gets close to mawkishness.