Critics reviews

[The shot where Yankovsky carries the candle] certainly raises the stakes for what a shot is expected to accomplish and what we seek from watching it. When we consider that a shot not only contains a sliver of life that it captured, but also a sliver of ours, however many seconds or minutes it occupies of our brief existence on this planet, why shouldn't we expect from each shot nothing less than life fully realized?

Like "Stalker," "Nostalghia" is distinguished by its deliberate camera moves and precise audio design. Delicate, selectively desaturated tones give the impression of a film simultaneously monochromatic and in color... "Nostalghia" lacks the confidence of his Soviet films. The artist tries too hard to impress — and yet his mastery of the medium is such that he succeeds.

Like Eugenia with the Madonna, we are bearing witness, and the lack of editing [in the candle-carrying scene] brings us closer, beyond the veil of the screen, harmonizing the real and the reel. The sublime sequence that follows Andrei's completion of the task—a hypnagogic vision of Tarkovsky's brooding protagonist finally at peace with where he is and where he was—collapses the boundaries further until all is insanely, immaculately one.

Tarkovsky had come to Italy from Russia, where filmmaking had, finally, become difficult for him. But he brought Russia with him. He's possibly the only director to make Italy look miserable: It's a film of decaying, disused old buildings, with water leaking through roofs or running through its floors. There's a powerful sense of place, at once vivid and dreamlike, that triumphs over narrative.

There are visions, memories, riddles, curious encounters, and a slow crescendo of spiritual longing. There's much sublimity... There are shocking acts that rupture the stillness, and then there's one of cinema's great endings, a wrenching, rapturous scene that would set both of those poets into embarrassed rewrites.

Even by the director's glacial standard, very little happens (which makes a late-inning self-immolation particularly bonkers)—and still, you might find yourself hooked. No one makes movies like this anymore. Spirituality and existential dislocation can be teased out of the margins by those who want those things to be there, but Nostalghia is really about dank pools of bubbling springs, decaying ruins and the incessant plink of dripping water accompanying distant voices.