The Seventh Seal (1957)
95 %
Reviews Counted: 40 Fresh: 38 Rotten:2 Average Rating: 9.1/10
Runtime: 1 hr 36 mins
Synopsis:
Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow), a knight, returns from a 10-year crusade with his squire, Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), to find his homeland ravaged by the plague. When the black-cloaked figure of Death (Bengt Ekerot) appears to claim them, Block, whose war experiences have left him cynical... [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Gunnar Bjornstrand, Max Von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe
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Reviews
Its view of a seemingly godless landscape in the grip of plague is still bold and frightening.
12/07/07 11:39 AM
Top Critic
It survives today only as an unusually pure example of a typical 50s art-film strategy: the attempt to make the most modern and most popular of art forms acceptable to the intelligentsia by forcing it into an arcane, antique mold.
07/30/07 07:05 PM
Top Critic The Seventh Seal is an existentialist masterpiece packed with stunning symbolism and mordant humour. It's also far more accessible that you might think. Go see it. Or else.
07/20/07 06:36 AM
Bergman's superbly shot wintry images, much like those of a silent film, print themselves indelibly on the mind, while the Knight's search for a God who never answers foreshadows the pessimism of the director's later work.
07/20/07 04:50 AM
Not a friendly film, but in the consciousness of suffering, the search for meaning and the acceptance of death, all (or nearly all) of Bergman is in it.
07/20/07 04:41 AM
It is endlessly imitated and spoofed; it is also an august pinnacle of high-risk, high-art filmmaking, and one with a reputation for being far more forbidding and humourless than it actually is.
07/20/07 03:41 AM
Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own.
07/20/07 03:27 AM
Ingmar Bergman’s black and white masterpiece The Seventh Seal has matured like a great wine over 50 years.
07/20/07 03:16 AM
Full of haunting, iconic images and a touch of hopeful humanity, The Seventh Seal is cinema at its most artful, a philosophical meditation on the meaning(lessness) of this mortal coil.
07/20/07 03:10 AM
A grand, thought-provoking and highly enjoyable piece of cinematic history.
07/20/07 02:36 AM
Though it dramatically never comes to life, it does give one a feel of the medieval times' obscene nature, brutality and superstitions.
09/05/06 07:42 PM
Not only highly impressive but thought-provoking, relevant and intensely moving in our present, nervous, times.
02/09/06 03:16 AM
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