Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Maleeha Vincent It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

851222 Greetings from Lithuania."Wild Strawberries" (1957), created by a legendary Ingmar Bergman reflects on life, death, childhood and what it takes to achieve a lot in your life via carrier, but missing upon beautiful moments in your life and most important family - all this is seen trough the eyes on an old man. That said, this is a very easy movie to watch - its beautifully acted written and directed. Also while the themes i mentioned can sound hard, this movie is lighthearted and kinda makes you think after it ends about your life - where you are at this moment and that it shouldn't be to late to change it if you don't want to end up as this old man of whose carriers achievements appreciation comes not from a family, but a young unknown people with a heart.Overall, "Wild Strawberries" is a superbly involving, smart, moving movie that you will definitely can see and appreciate it. Great movie.

calvinnme ... because Dr. Isak Borg, apparently both an M.D. and a professor, is extremely self-aware. In the opening minutes of the film he admits he has allowed himself to become isolated from others and declares that his most annoying characteristics are being a pedant and thinking that women should not be allowed to smoke in the car. He has one son, also a doctor, and his wife Karen has been dead for many years.Professor Borg is supposed to get an honorary degree in Lund that evening, and after waking from a horrifying dream that seems to be about death and loss of identity that only Ingmar Bergman could cook up, decides at 3AM to drive his car rather than fly as originally planned. His housekeeper of 40 years has a fit and he teases her that she is carrying on like a wife. In spite of the early hour his only son's wife, who is staying with him, asks to come along too.So off they go at dawn for the long drive up the coast. In fact, I found Professor Borg to be a good guy. His daughter-in-law, who is his guest, talks about how ruthless he is. I'm sorry I just don't see it. When they stop at a gas station the young attendant talks about how Borg is still remembered from decades before when he was a physician there and insists on paying for his gas. Borg cheerfully invites a young girl named Sara and her two male companions to ride with them as far as Lund - they are going to Italy together. When the group is sideswiped by a couple, Borg invites them to ride with them. It is only because the husband berates his wife to the point that she hits him repeatedly that they are asked to leave, and then it is the daughter in law who does the asking.Borg makes various stops. He stops at his summer home as a child and revisits, not a memory, but an episode he could not have seen or heard because he was elsewhere at the time, between his first and true love Sarah and his brother Sigfrid, as he tries to steal her away from Isak with some bold physical behavior and must have won, because the two went on to marry and have six children. Yet, Borg does not seem angry. Instead you see a trace of a smile and nostalgia on his face, especially when he sees Sara in tears talking to her cousin about Isak's sweetness versus Sigfrid's physicality and how she is horrified that she is attracted to the latter. This is really the only pleasant dream/daydream/memory of the several along the way. In the end I figured that the young girl and her two struggling paramours are probably signifying Isak, Sigfrid, and Sara in his youth, and the feuding couple probably represents Borg's own unhappy marriage in which, after seeing how he felt about Sara and how he must have felt losing her to his own rather boorish brother, the wife could not have helped but feel like anything but the back up plan. Isak and Karin had only the one child, their son, compared to Sigfrid's six. His own son, married for many years, has none. It's like Bergman is equating fertility to connectivity, not just to a spouse, but to people in general. In the end, it's not like Isak Borg was a bad person who redeems himself because of all of these dreams and touches with the distant past, but he does seem more at peace with his past as he readies for bed that night.I'd highly recommend it. I'm no expert on Swedish cinema or Bergman at all, but I thought it was interesting how Bergman seems to be saying that Borg's "wrong turn", if there was any at all, could be traced back to losing his first and true love to his own brother, and that everything after that just fed off of that disappointment. As I look back on my life, I think that I can agree with that assessment.And now a word about the daughter-in-law. She accuses Isak of having said some just horrible things. Things he does not remember saying and things the audience never hears. Perhaps she wants to blame her husband's bleak and icy behavior on someone and Isak is convenient? At any rate, by journey's end she has warmed to Isak enough to confide in him about a great turmoil in her marriage. This was more of a change in her than any change I saw in Isak. This one is really worth a look, even if you normally aren't into foreign film. My review is just my take on the plot. I'm sure it means many things to many people or we wouldn't still be discussing and watching it 60 years later.

Degree7 An aging professor of bacterium embarks upon a day's journey from Stockholm to Lundsk to receive an honourary award for his career work. The night before, he has a Bunuel-esque nightmare that foreshadows his own fate, seeing a watch with no hands, and his own corpse in a coffin. Cleverly, the film hints that he may be out of time before his own mortality claims him, and thus he begins a journey of self discovery where his skeletons reach out from the closet.For my first Bergman film, I was impressed by the crisp presentation and cerebral story. Its not often that filmmakers explore the aging process in sympathetic ways, and this is helped by the characterization of Dr. Isak Borg as an every man which makes him easier to relate to. He's a successful academic, although happiness in his personal life was sacrificed for concentration on his profession. And so Dr. Borg asks the eternal question of whether his existence has had any significance at all. Along the road trip with his daughter in law Marianne (who resents his emotional distancing), they pick up passengers that each represent and harken back to the failures of Borg's past. An old bickering couple that remind him of his unhappy marriage, and a love triangle between two men and a girl who symbolize a lost love from his adolescence. As the memories come flooding back, the old doctor descends into his recollections and subconscious dreams, where suppressed issues come hurtling forth from the depths. His clinical nature and lack of interest in relationships led to his first love leaving him for his brother, and later his wife having a bastard child with another man, who Borg still raised as his own. There is a haunting scene where he takes Marianne to visit his lonely, decrepit mother, and there the audience realizes along with her that this lack of zest for life seems to run through the family; Isak's son is too revealed to be a misanthropic bore, who rejects his wife Marianne's request for a child. The result of his resentfulness at having been raised as an unwanted child himself.The doctor soon learns that the only good he ever accomplished was tied to his medicinal work, but at the cost of living a life of solitude and isolation, a mindset that has afflicted his own son. There is a subtle theme from Bergman that Borg's ignorance of his family and friends has been the result of his turning away from God, as hinted by the young men they pick up (a minister and a doctor, the two sides of Isak's psyche) who fight and debate over its existence. No real answer is given in the end, symbolized by the men's stalemate in the argument. But as said later in the film: "a doctor's first duty is forgiveness." It seems the first step to even beginning to comprehend the question is by forgiving the flaws of those around you and the ones within. And although Borg fears he may be too late to reconcile the animosity between him and his family, the film makes an inspiring statement by the end that it's never never too late to redeem oneself and begin enjoying life. The story is resolved, and the generational cycle of resentment broken, with the rapprochement between two lovers and the potential birth of new life.Alas, there are flaws in Bergman's work that cannot be forgiven, and he was no God. The first major flashback acts as a crux of the plot, but appears contrived due to Isak being present for an event that was impossible for him to have known. Nor do we ever get to really see this "cold distance" that Isak possessed as a man; only its effects. The director is to be commended for not spoon feeding the audience the philosophical aspects (this is an art film from Sweden after all), but sometimes his high brow obscurity gets in the way of my enjoyment of the story. It's all a little too esoteric for me. While the message may seem a little trite and simplistic at times, this is still a heartwarming and life-affirming fable from a legendary auteur. "Wild Strawberries" has a comforting aura, although like Doctor Isak Borg himself, the film can be rather too pedantic for its own good.

Monkey-D-Luffy I was caught unawares by the mellifluous verbiage of the Swedish language. The guy playing Isak had a lilting, singsong voice that held one's attention. I managed to understand most of the movie, which is a direct one despite its symbolism, or rather because of the symbolism. The thing about Isak is that he doesn't seem very much sophisticated. His fear is visceral but there's no raw insight to back it up. Maybe he was a simpleton in a gentleman's clothing. I didn't understand the reason for the title though. Regardless, Wild Strawberries didn't come even close to dislodging 12 Angry Men as my favorite movie of 1957, let alone the best film of all time. Ingmar Bergman, I must say, had something new to show, but he didn't show it, he said it. That's his sin. Hope you've found this review useful.