Word: sydow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...house film came of age in the late '50s with Janus' release of a dozen or so Bergman movies, particularly this medieval epic about a knight playing chess with Death during the plague years. As gaunt, handsome and stern as the face of its star, Max von Sydow, The Seventh Seal comes with an illuminating commentary by Bergman scholar Peter Cowie and a nifty short about the process of restoring the film...
...first of three Foreign Film Oscars and landed him on the cover of TIME. In this adaptation of a medieval ballad, expanded and Freudianized by scripter Ulla Isaksson, a sweet, pampered girl (Birgitta Pettersson) is murdered by herdsmen, who are in turn killed by her father (Max Von Sydow). A miracle play and a horror movie--it was remade in 1972 as The Last House on the Left--the movie retains its stark grandeur in the chiaroscuro cinematography of Sven Nykvist. As a peasant girl who witnesses and wills the murder, Gunnel Lindblom has a feral magnificence...
...made for cute: the clear blue eyes, the chipmunk cheeks, the giant smile on the pixie face. And yet Dakota Fanning takes on roles that Max von Sydow would find too dark: the daughter losing her retarded father in I Am Sam with Sean Penn in 2001; a kidnapping victim in last year's Man on Fire with Denzel Washington; a horror story about a girl with an imaginary friend in January's Hide and Seek with Robert De Niro; a kid running from aliens in this summer's Steven Spielberg movie War of the Worlds. It will...
...Brattle’s Ingmar Bergman festival continues with the story of a 19th century conjurer-hypnotist, played by Bergman repertory player and Exorcist priest Max Von Sydow, traveling throughout shadowy Sweden along with his troupe of repertory performers. After falling into the hands of a grand inquisitor, a doctor decides it his professional responsibility to expose Sydow as a charlatan and the two sides clash in a brilliantly evocative philosophical duel between art and science, rationality and irrationality, believer and non believer. It all climaxes in a beautifully destructive sequence that reduces the once proud doctor to his bare...
...Sydow, alighting from the Ingmar Bergman films, certainly brings height and hauteur to the role - and if you're going for the Renaissance masters' vision of Jesus as a European, he might as well be Nordic. (Though, as I was reminded by TIME.com's Tony Karon, my guru in all things political, Jesus was a Semite; if he was tall, lank, bearded and dressed in flowing robes, as von Sydow is, the person he would have resembled most would be...Osama bin Laden.) The actor's iconographic superiority gives this Jesus the big frosty balls to tell his followers...