Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman doesn’t have the cachet he once had. “It is perhaps frivolous to speak of a great artist ‘falling from fashion.’ But many of the values that are so highly prized in artworks of the early 21st century — irony, multiculturalism, a certain breeziness of affect — are quite different from those that Bergman offers. He is an unapologetically “high culture” European modernist, from a very specific time and place, one deeply influenced by the Lutheran faith (which he abandoned but not without a struggle), by psychoanalysis and existentialism, and by the dreamlike chamber plays of his great countryman August Strindberg. To this heritage, he has added his own filmic innovations, his own anxieties and obsessions, and a matchless linear intensity.”