Nostalghia

Lintang A.

Nostalghia is a deep and thoughtful film, best suited to those viewers who are interested in spending some time with a film that takes a great deal of time to fully reveal it's self. Like the majority of Tarkovsky's films, it is bleak, dreamlike and hypnotic, in the way in which the images just linger on the screen, waiting to be decoded. 9/10

Stefan Drees

Maybe the most personal (and most autobiographic) of Tarkovsky's films. I always appreciated how he creates different spaces - exterior and interior spaces but also spaces of remembrance and perception -, how he provides them with different soundscapes (pay attention to the varieties of water sounds during the two hours) and how he connects them in the end in the vision of a landscape inside the ruins of a cathedral.

Wee Hunk

Speaking of nostalgia, I remember the cover of the videotape was misleading. It had some scary looking Russian general. I thought it was going to be an action film. I thought it was boring. Many years later I saw 'Solaris' and I was blown away. That was a game-changer for me. I decided to try Nostalghia again, and it was amazing.

José Neves

In his first film outside of Russia and with that feeling controlling him, Tarkovsky submits his unbelievable formal strength to an exercise of domesticated and demonstrative dramaturgy, as usual with Tonino Guerra, where characters are merely exemplary schemes - mainly the insufferable Domiziana Giordano in her function of the "eternal feminine", as stereotyped as the mad visionary and the sacred, the "Themes".

msmichel

Does anyone represent poetry in cinema more than the late Andrei Tarkovsky? His penultimate film is perhaps his most personal and one of his most challenging works. A rumination on existence, expression, expiry and experience. Performers are well cast especially Oleg Yankovskiy and Domiziana Giordano. Slow moving in a glacial way but rewarding in reflection in a way that demands another viewing.

Duncan Gray

Possibly Tarkovsky's most personal, self-reflexive film, and it's up against some stiff competition. Just as a writer might fill a diary wondering if beauty or art or god or sex can fill the void of not having a sense of home, Tarkovsky expresses it in a dreamscape, and one that pays tribute to his new land—this is late Fellini, Tarkovskified. If anyone says this is his minor film, just smile and change the subject.

filmcapsule

Perhaps Tarkovsky's most trying film, but it's also a fascinating evocation of a sort of existential purgatory. Characters circle around a desolate landscape (externalizing the film's emotional tone of elegy) and struggle to move forward. The film's breathtaking final shot confirms how memories can trap and immobilize us.

Scott Barley

While I don't think this is as consistent, or as consistently beautiful as Mirror, I think that some of its images may be more beautiful... I don't know; there is so much more to unearth and to understand.