Critics reviews

An understated and rich portrait of a woman forced to reconsider her values and the place of her past in the personal and social circumstances in which she now finds herself.

Shepitko's eye and ear for detail are admirable. Nadya asks the curator if anyone has brought him a samovar for his collection, referring to an outmoded teapot she no doubt used in her younger days in sarcastic reference to her own age. Shepitko shoots a close-up of a high heel sinking into the school's cheap floor, turned to putty by a pervasive dampness. She very effective isolates the charged look between Nadya and the student she expelled at the crowded tavern...

As a portrait of a woman in all her frustration, strength, shrugging acceptance and longing for lost love – both of a flying machine and a man – it is unsurpassed. Wings was Russian director Larisa Shepitko's first feature after film school, and her realist style is combined with exquisite cinematography.