The Ox

Directed and co-written by Sven Nykvist, longtime cinematographer for Ingmar Bergman, THE OX boasts a superb cast of Bergman regulars and flawless cinematography. But the best efforts of Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson and Max von Sydow do little to relieve the film's mood of unmitigated gloom. This grim 19th-century period piece feels at least twice as long as its 91-minute running time. The true story on which THE OX is based is one of devastating hardship during the great Swedish drought of the late 1860s, when droves emigrated to the US. In Smaland, a small village hard hit by the famine, Helge (Stellan Skarsgard), a young tenant farmer, secretly kills one of the...