Mr Ingmar Bergman’s finest movies.

The BFI’s season on Mr Ingmar Bergman, at the Southbank in London until March, provides the perfect chance to revisit stone-cold classics and lesser-known pearls in the Swedish director’s canon. He is the ideal January filmmaker: painterly black-and-whites, rich existential meanderings on memory and identity, the musical lilts of the Swedish language. Over the years, his films have come in and out of fashion, but his sophisticated female characters and depiction of artless tyranny resonate more than ever. Hunker down with these five, which we consider to be his finest.

Mr Victor Sjöström plays academic Isak Borg, a pedantic widower who drives across Sweden with his daughter-in-law (Ms Bibi Andersson) to collect an honorary degree from Lund University. As he passes landmarks from his past, the journey kindles his subconscious. From an opening dream sequence with handless clocks and eyeless faces, the film teems with astonishing imagery. Memories are presented, as Borg observes, “with the strength of a true stream of events”, indistinguishable from the present day. In the film’s saddest scene, his childhood girlfriend Sara announces she’d rather marry his brother and urges him to smile in the mirror she’s holding up. Old Isak winces tearfully, “But it hurts so.” For the time, its gender politics are unusually progressive, like when Ms Andersson stands up to a sexist hitchhiker or to Borg’s old-man insistence that women shouldn’t smoke. A masterly portrait of memory and old age, admirers of Mr Kazuo Ishiguro or Pixar’s Up will feast on Wild Strawberries.

Released the same year as Wild Strawberries, this religious allegory – set in the Middle Ages – was Mr Bergman’s international breakthrough. Knight Antonius Block (Mr Max von Sydow) returns from the Crusades to find a homeland ravaged by plagues and witch hunts. White-faced, black-cloaked Death awaits Block, but by challenging him to a game of chess, the knight prolongs his life and teases out the beliefs of his neighbours. It is one of the most parodied films of all time, but its strangeness, subtle performances and philosophical gravitas have held up surprisingly well.

Impressionistic vampire horror? Jungian dissection of the artist’s life? Schizophrenia tone-poem? Parable for sexual liberation? This story of nurse Alma and mute actress Elisabet, who move to a hut on the island of Fårö and slowly merge into each other, has been described as the Mount Everest of cinematic analysis, a film whose significance critics continue to debate. Brushed with a similar 1966 psychosexual panache to Blowup (whose Italian director, Mr Michelangelo Antonioni, died on the same day as Mr Bergman), its influence on recent screen enigmas, from Mr David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive to Ms Jennifer Lawrence’s breakdown in Mr Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, is tangible. See it and make up your own mind.

A quietly nightmarish variation of Mr Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, three women tend to a dying fourth in a 19th-century mansion shadowed with secrets, nostalgia and repressed sexuality. In a film haunted by silence, Mr Bergman exploits sound and colour with a ruthless elegance: the ticks of the clock, the rustle of dress fabric, agonised whimpers, curtains the same crimson as the blood from where a bedridden sister cuts herself. A potently elliptical meditation on feminism, family and the overlaps between sex and death, it won the Best Cinematography Oscar for the director’s visionary long-term collaborator Mr Sven Nyqvist.

A contemporary of E.T. and Blade Runner, Mr Bergman’s late masterpiece had a more overt sense of the supernatural than his earlier works. Told from the perspective of a 10-year-old, astute innocent Alexander is bereft when the death of his actor-manager father forces his mother to marry a seemingly benign bishop. Alexander and his sister Fanny have to leave the warmth of the family theatre for a home stifled by religion, but the ghosts of the past don’t stay quiet for long. A dizzying period fairytale on the family as theatre company and a magical revenge-drama that champions love, fantasy and illusion against repressive dogma, Fanny And Alexander is the late-autumn sonata of Mr Bergman’s career.

Buy tickets for the Mr Ingmar Bergman season here

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