Reviews
Sep 8, 2020
No one tops Tarkovsky's ability for immersion, and the metaphysical enigma of Stalker is one of cinema's most impressive achievements.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Aug 21, 2020
There is no denying Tarkovsky's unwavering vision to create something so unique and transcendental. {Full review in Spanish]
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Aug 7, 2020
The alternating use of matted and color palettes and frame within frame, shots by Tarkovsky and his trio of cinematographers, is an aesthetic wonderment in its own right.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
May 22, 2020
Profoundly and fundamentally about the mood it creates and the atmosphere it evokes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Jun 4, 2019
Like something out of a dream, guiding us through a haunted, desolate landscape that eerily presages the Chernobyl disaster that would occur seven years later.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Apr 28, 2019
It is masterfully done, contains some haunting images, and has a difficult-to-pinpoint mesmerism in the way it progresses. Once it gets you (which, for some, may never happen), it will hold you like a fly trapped in amber.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Feb 7, 2019
It's a film that challenges us to be bored, while refusing to be boring.
Feb 7, 2019
Yet Stalker is a movie to be watched as many times as physically possible... It really is that astounding.
Nov 11, 2018
A true existential parable: The Zone being a genius dramaturgical blank canvas around which Tarkovsky wraps another of his epic musings on what it means to be human.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Feb 14, 2018
There are no flying saucers in the great Russian director's haunting tale of a journey into the depths of a postapocalyptic landscape, but it offers visual splendor, as well as mysteries, portents and miracles.
Jan 15, 2018
Stalker traces a mysterious, metaphysical odyssey undertaken by three strangers uncertain of their own desires' boundaries.
Sep 9, 2017
Aa lengthy, talky quest for meaning, punctuated by long takes and huge moments of silence. Ultimately though, it's a rewarding one for sure, especially once you fall under the spell of its hypnotic filmmaking.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Aug 21, 2017
Stalker is in truth about the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union-and therefore, the end of the 20th century and the socialist experiment.
Aug 9, 2017
A bleak sleepwalk into the heart of darkness.
Jul 31, 2017
Arguably Andrei Tarkovsky's finest masterpiece, the Russian director's 1979 film is the culmination of a career-long preoccupation with memory, trauma and the relationship between subjective perception and physical reality.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Jul 24, 2017
an emotionally and philosophically intense experience that rewards patience and attention and all but demands repeat viewings
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Jun 27, 2017
Jean Paul Sartre's 'No Exit' meets 'Waiting For Godot" in Chernobyl in this influential filmic think piece from visionary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
May 18, 2017
The film has a hypnotic pull, drawing the viewer deeper and deeper into its enigmatic adventure by crafting a world all its own.
May 17, 2017
Yet another incarnation, yet another murmuring of a movie that once seen, will be dreamt again and again.
Full Review
| Original Score: 10/10
Oct 29, 2015
The pursuit of happiness takes on a meandering, philosophical and richly visual form in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5