Grimerlana Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

L.D. Gerrits Besides its depth and breadth of concern, 'Andrei Rublev' is known for the diversity and extremity of its divergences. More than a historical biography or period drama, it is a collection of moments that can be encountered both in their own right and as figurations. Over the course of three hours, we actually meet more or less three semi-protagonists, most notably Rublev himself, but memorably, too, the young bellmaker, Boriska, whose 'stingy' father has left him 'without the secret' of his trade, but who nonetheless successfully manages to cast the bell, in the final episode. Through these various characters we are confronted with not History, but history in the lower-case: people shaping a passage through time, sometimes confounded, sometimes redeemed.With 'Andrei Rublev,' Tarkovsky was consciously crafting a language that owed nothing to literature, and it's a pity so few others followed him. In today's cinema, we're still served up linear, cause-and-effect biographies of artists as if, by doing so, we'll understand the person and be able to make sense of their art. Andrei Rublev operates according to a different understanding of time and history. It asks questions about the relationship between the artist, their society and their spiritual beliefs and doesn't seek to answer them. 'In cinema it is necessary not to explain, but to act upon the viewer's feelings, and the emotion which is awoken is what provokes thought,' wrote Tarkovsky in 1962.'I think there exists a law: author cinema is made of poets and all great directors are poets.' 'Andrei Rublev' is an example, perhaps the most important, of Tarkovsky's commitment to a formal 'poetics' of cinema. Its nonlinear narrative structure, the metaphorical interrelation of images, and its symbolism make for less a story about an event than a way of experiencing events interact. Ingmar Bergman remarked that Tarkovsky was 'the greatest' because he 'invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.'More than this, though, what we sit through is not some abstraction of reality into reverie, but an attempt to think through this conflict: the cold fact of the world and our mediated experience of it. In the end, Rublev resolves to paint again. He comforts the bellmaker, Boriska, who is overwhelmed by the solitude of his achievement: 'What a great joy for all men. You gave them such a great happiness: and you cry? Stop it!' 'Andrei Rublev' is worthy of remembering not because it collapses life into art, but because it attempts to imagine how art can be life's witness. Hence, Tarkovsky's observation: 'Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but would simply live in it.'10 out of 10.

Leofwine_draca ANDREI RUBLEV is another slow and ponderous movie from Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, a man best known in the west for his lengthy sci-fi effort SOLARIS. This one's even less accessible to the average cinema goer, featuring a dense plot loaded with religious content. The story is about a real life Russian painter of the 15th century, told in various illustrative chapters.I admit that I found the subject matter of this film rather off-putting and the lengthy running time even more so. Tarkovsky's film is picturesque and beautiful, yes, but not on the same level as Bergman, for example. I liked the way the story is broken up into chapters but much of the material seems deliberately pious and the mannered performances don't help. The most dramatic part is a Tartar raid around the midway mark, but sadly this moment features some real-life animal cruelty that makes the experience rather repellent.

deickos Bergman wrote in his autobiography, this is the best film ever made and I find it very difficult to disagree. After watching Tarkovsky's films one cannot be the same person unless he is completely dry inside. I can find so few films that can stand beside Andrei Rublev! and many of them are again Tarkovsky's! We are so grateful for all this man left us - and it is only 7 films. Others would make dozens and would not reach Tarkovsky even if they lived a thousand years. The distances inside this man's work are simply immense.

t-viktor212 What certainly makes Andrei Rublev a masterpiece of a movie is its tone. THe film is filled with really crude realism, darkness, religiousity that just makes you understand the times the film is set. Note that this kind of dark medievality is similar to the one appearingin the rest of Europe, so it helps picture the 1300s.The Famous iconographer I've never heard of before watching this movie, Andrei Rublev, is a very religious person living in a really dark time. While it doesn't show as much constant brutal violence as for example Schindler's list has, the minimal violence shown is still really shocking and brutal. As I stated above I didn't know much about this iconographer, so I searched, but found really little information about the character, maybe I'll learn something when we get to that form of art in school.I wouldn't say that this movie was "Beautiful" or that it had "great visuals". It wasn't a movie that gave you positive feelings in the end, because it wasn't meant to. It wasn't a movie with the sort of great visuals Stalker or The Mirror had. But nonetheless, Andrei Rublev is on of my favourite Tarkovskij films, together with the other two aforementioned films.