Max von Sydow made eleven films with Ingmar Bergman, beginning with The Seventh Seal, in which he plays chess with Death and asks questions the film does not answer. He was twenty-seven and made up to look older.
The Exorcist cast him as Father Merrin, again aged with makeup, and the character’s exhaustion is the counterweight to everything else in that film.
He worked internationally for six decades, from Flash Gordon to Minority Report to Game of Thrones, and was nominated twice, for Pelle the Conqueror and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the latter with no dialogue at all.
He held Swedish and later French citizenship and worked in at least four languages.
Brian BlessedFlash Gordon (1980) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Dino De Laurentiis spent twenty-seven million dollars on a deliberately camp space opera, hired Queen to score it, and produced something no serious film could get near. The…
Cliff RobertsonThree Days of the Condor (1975) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man who reads books for the CIA goes out for lunch and comes back to find everybody he works with shot. The film changed…
Ben GazzaraVoyage of the Damned (1976) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The true story of the MS St. Louis, which carried 937 Jewish refugees out of Hamburg in 1939 and was refused entry everywhere it went. A…
Ellen BurstynWilliam Friedkin's 1973 demonic possession drama. Linda Blair as Regan, Max von Sydow as Father Merrin.
Bengt EkerotThe Seventh Seal is the foundational arthouse film and one of the great works of the twentieth century. Max von Sydow plays Antonius Block, a knight returning from the Crusades to a Sweden in the grip of the Black Death.
Arnold SchwarzeneggerJohn Milius directed and co-wrote with Oliver Stone. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Conan in his first significant English-language role.
Colin FarrellMinority Report is a Spielberg film arguing against surveillance and predictive control while being too Spielberg to commit fully to the darkness its premise requires. Dick's source material was about the arbitrary nature of certainty, and Spielberg captures that element…
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