Critics reviews

It clocks its 186 minutes without anybody ever picking up a brush, but Tarkovsky fills the gap with a sinuous directing and majestic mise en scène that add to it a virtuosic painting-like quality.

A mesmerizing portrait of an artist and cleric undone by a world that is cruel, chaotic, unexplainable.

Everyone would argue that it’s always best to watch a director’s entire filmography chronologically (with the exception of Semih Kaplanoglou’s trilogy, which includes Bal), I found that my watching Tarkovsky’s oeuvre almost the other way around added a magnificent ghostly atmosphere to Rublev.

A strong contender for the greatest Soviet film, Andrei Tarkovsky's second feature (completed in 1966 but not shown publicly until 1969 and not released in its native country until 1971) is immersive and overwhelming, steeping viewers in a stunningly detailed recreation of the medieval world and offering profound meditations on the nature of human suffering, the social value of art and religion, and the possibility of achieving transcendence in earthly affairs.

Tarkovsky merges dour meditation with barnburner technique in this overwhelming parable, a bleak widescreen scrutinized by an exuberantly tracking-craning-dollying camera... The honeyed collage of paintings is from Lust for Life, though the closing image could have only come from Tarkovsky's dreams. Ingmar Bergman famously saw it by chance and paid it the greatest compliment: "Someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say!"