one of his best, or not?

I understand the strong positive opinion from most posters here; I also understand why some reviewers (even those who like Bergman generally) were not fans of the film. Repeating material from my response to another poster on another thread, let me just offer this little hedge of an opinion.

If you understand the film as a kind of critique of the hyper-navel-gazing, overanalytic psychological thing going on in the '70s, especially in northern and western Europe and the U.S., it makes some sense. Eva goes after her mother with accusation after accusation, never thinking for a moment about whether her mother's own behavior might come from some kind of pain of her own; she (Eva) has the outer shell of being demure, shy, "nice," etc., but when Mom shows up, she really lets her have it in a very cruel and judgmental way.

When I first saw the film, I was actually sort of furious about how overpraised it seemed, if this psychodrama thing was being played straight. (I like Bergman in general, but I confess to thinking that on occasion he can be overpraised, and some elements in some of his films seem a little dated or cliched in that Eurofartsy sort of way. But mostly, I like him.) But after the letter in the final scene, I started to wonder whether the film was Bergman's way of really poking a whole in the idea of backward-looking, blame-inducing psychoanalysis, and opting instead for something beyond all that rehash and wheel-spinning -- specifically, the "mercy" mentioned in the letter, which was conveyed, ironically, by a minister. If that is the actual meaning of the film, I'd say it goes from one of Bergman's worst (if it was being played straight) to a really good film (if this kind of quiet but devastating undermining was actually going on). Played straight, it sounds like a lot of pop-psychobabble of the time. If it intended to go beyond that -- and it seems to me it did -- we've got something entirely different.

I do have to wonder how many of the positive reviews given over the years, including (or even especially) those from ordinary viewers, have to do with finding something "sympathetic" in all the drama, something they "can relate to." There is so much conclusory pop-psychologyspeak in the film that makes for bad dialogue if it's to be taken seriously (greatly in question, as I've already mentioned), but a lot of viewers seem to find something very carthatic about the whole drama regardless of all that, and it seems to me that can color the decision about whether the film itself is actually good or not.