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At least one critic has called this Sokurov's most political film, but on its deepest level it considers not a particular war but the complex feelings between mothers and the young men they send out into the world to kill or be killed.
Remarkable, how little Sokurov tells us, while telling us so much.
The film is built on a massive incongruity: Watching this octogenarian drag her little bent-up wheeled luggage cart, amid rolling tanks and military transport trucks, you're looking at two eternal verities%u2014war, and civilians caught up in its wake%u20
Alexandra is a pleasure to watch, but it's also one of those lovely, unclassifiable movies that flourishes better with repeated or prolonged exposures.
In the hands of visionary filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, this simple material makes for a haunting drama about war, generational relationships and the human condition.
Without mounting a soap box, the film makes eloquent points about the struggle.
An unusual masterpiece atmospheric anti-war film that is an example of cinema as pure feeling.
Eccentric and tender, it is a picture out for grace rather than polemics, and it finds enough to make one see emotional intimacy anew
Sokurov is able to say things about the terrible conflict without obvious polemic but to the maximum possible effect. That's largely why he is one of the most audacious and original directors in the world today.
His sepia images of war's futility are beautiful, and Vishnevskaya's face is a compelling one, but they cannot compensate for the soporific anti-narrative.
The eerie haze of the visuals, the half-babble of music and the toneless, teasing dialogue dance attendance on the strangest ghost of all: Galina Vishnevskaya.
Shot in shades of bleached-out khaki brown and augmented by a heart-rending orchestral score, it's a unique and intensely moving elegy for wasted lives.
It's a film of small details rather than big gestures...and all the more powerful for it.
But Aleksandr Sokurov, with the mesmerising and subtly disorientating directorial style that he has mastered, makes it feel emotionally real and imaginatively true. A wonderful film.
A bone-weariness pervades every inch of the film; even the light is bleached dry of vitality.
Apart from a thoroughly irritating background track of schmaltzy classical music, this is Sokurov at his shortest and most digestible.
It's also quietly challenging, in its own way, not least in its portrait of old age, its trials, new freedoms and the privilege of changing one's mind before it becomes too late.
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