From the late 1950s through the early 1980s, the name Ingmar Bergman was virtually synonymous with art-house cinema. But by the time the Swedish filmmaker died in 2007, he seemed to have gone out of fashion. A mere week after his death, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times titled “Scenes From an Overrated Career.”

“The same qualities that made Mr. Bergman’s films go down more easily” than those of more demanding masters like Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson, Rosenbaum wrote, “also make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart.”

A filmmaker’s perceived importance waxes and wanes; so do ideas about what art ought to do. The Criterion Collection’s impressive and almost exhaustive Blu-ray set, “Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema,” released Tuesday, makes a fresh case for his continuing importance. Do the films in it impart many secrets? Having explored this new box-set, I found that Bergman’s art today seems more interested in laying bare intimacies than in proffering enigmas. It certainly offers dozens of hours of engagement, illumination and even entertainment.

For decades, few living directors could lay greater claim to a seat in the art-house pantheon than Bergman. His reputation had been building internationally since the foreign release of “Summer With Monika” in 1953 — later recut and marketed to American viewers as “Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl” — a racier-than-Hollywood film that earned him some notoriety. His drawing-room sex comedy, “Smiles of a Summer Night” (1955) was a hit at Cannes. (Release dates reflect the year of a film’s foreign theatrical debut.)