Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-20th-century Sweden. Ingmar Bergman intended Fanny and Alexander as his swan song, and it is the director’s warmest and most autobiographical film, a complete triumph that combines his trademark melancholy and emotional intensity with immense joy and sensuality. The opening Christmas sequences are glorious evocations of family, joy, and childhood, though, this being Bergman, it gets darker from there. The film won Oscars for Costume Design, Set Decoration, and Sven Nykvist’s glorious cinematography (he also won in 1973 for another Bergman collaboration, Cries and Whispers). Bergman described Fanny and Alexander as “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”