Cries and Whispers, also called Viskningar och rop, is a film by acclaimed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman that was released on March 5, 1973. The powerful story centering on a dying woman and her two sisters earned the film five Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. It went on to win the award for Best Cinematography.

In Sweden in the late 1800s, a woman named Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is dying of cancer in her rural manor. The film explores her painful, half-willing decline into death. Her sisters, Maria and Karin (Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin), visit her on her deathbed, but each has their own problems - for Maria, an affair that resulted in her husband's suicide, and for Karin, a death wish that drives her to brutal self-mutilation. The sisters become steadily more callous as Agnes' condition worsens, until the only person who can give Agnes comfort is her maid Anna (Kari Sylwan), who has experienced death herself - the death of her daughter.

• Harriet Andersson as Agnes

• Kari Sylwan as Anna

• Ingrid Thulin as Karin

• Liv Ullmann as Maria and Maria's mother

• Anders Ek as Isak, the priest

• Inga Gill as Story teller

• Erland Josephson as David, the doctor

• Henning Moritzen as Joakim, Maria's husband

• Georg Arlin as Fredrik, Karin's husband

"Crying for help in a world they can neither cope with nor comprehend, [Bergman's] characters confront a silent universe inhabited by a God whose attitude is at best uncaring, at worst malignant. How the individual adjusts to his plight remains Bergman's central concern, and in Cries and Whispers he provides a bravado portrait of four women in this barren emotional landscape."&mdashVarietyhttp://www.variety.com/review/VE1117796139.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

"More a rough draft for a Bergman movie than a finished product, this 1972 film promises much and delivers little or nothing."—Don Druker, Chicago Readerhttp://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/cries-and-whispers/Film?oid=1073042

"Bergman never made another film this painful. To see it is to touch the extremes of human feeling. It is so personal, so penetrating of privacy, we almost want to look away."—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Timeshttp://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020818/REVIEWS08/208180301/1023

"In order to understand why Cries and Whispers is a great film, it must be experienced, not merely watched."—James Berardinelli, Reelviewshttp://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=859