Critics reviews

Perhaps its unfair to gauge the film against others before and since, but Ivan's Childhood has the rare ability to stop you in your tracks.... You watch a shot and think, ‘Wow, an immense amount of thought and planning has clearly gone into that shot.' But Tarkovsky, not a man to rest on artistic laurels, repeats the formula again, creates another elaborate shot which forces the viewer to consider the form as equal to the content.

One of the boldest, most indelible directorial debuts in the history of cinema... Though Mosfilm originally intended the film to be directed by Edward Gaikovich Abalyan, Tarkovsky makes it his own by imbuing it with fragments of his personal wartime experience. Indeed, the metaphysical forces prominently featured in his later work are already in play here.

Tarkovsky's attention to the vicissitudes of what he called "poetic logic" generates a beneficial tension between the reality of the film's external events and the more equivocal inner life of its central character. This logic also endows the film's surfeit of symbolically charged objects with an almost tactile dimensionality. As a result, a polyvalent sensuality invests the interspersed dream sequences with a powerful affective charge.

Perhaps no other filmmaker can be said to have equalled the breathtaking beauty and cinematic genius of the opening sequence of Ivan's childhood, the movements of the elaborate crane shots tracing the director's inimitable signature, an example of his matchless skill at ‘sculpting in time'. (Needless to say, this scene was one of Tarkovsky's additions to the script he was presented with).