The_Osprey I have never seen a film so visually beautiful. However, it is devoid of plot. My review can't contain spoilers as there's nothing to spoil. Just watch the incredible cinematic beauty.

julibufa This must be the single most boring experience I've witnessed in film. I mean, regardless of the purpose of cinema, art or entertainment, at least show me something. That's the one thing I needed, something, I got nothing.It's amazing how the plot seems interesting at first, yet the film just doesn't get into it. This Andrei guy and his lady interpreter go to Italy to study a composer. Nothing of the sort matters. This composer is never mentioned again after one mindless conversation about it. I don't recall any useful information from anyone. I don't recall any scene in this film at all actually. I just don't remember how this film looks anymore, because it's incredibly boring and unimpressive. It could've been a good 5 minute short. But it was painful. Phisically painful.I didn't get any character development whatsoever. The protagonist haves this weird visions of his wife, that are only with the purpose of filler, nothing more; the interpreter kind of wants to have him but she doesn't really try; there's this weird obsession with a candle going through an empty pool; non of this is either connected, interesting, useful, explained or later developed. It just kind of exists. I'm left with absolutely nothing. Tarkovsky always does that to me, he just show me some pictures he likes and I'm suppose to do all the thinking. Now he went full speed.It takes... minutes... for the scenes... to go... anywhere zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz(Just because I don't like to excruciatingly bore myself to death, that doesn't mean I enjoy "cars exploding", like many people would say. That's just being the most pretentious you can get.)And there is no plot! The characters act like lost aliens that just try to imitate humans. Everyone moves slowly, there's no reward at the ending and I just can't grasp anything interesting from anywhere. I'm starving here!Also, the part of Domenico's speech, that seems to be one of the "highlights" people praise, has "Tarkovsky" written all over it... and not in the good way. This speech is fully out of place, extremely overlong, pretentious, meaningless and dull. I mean, it's not that it wouldn't be an interesting artistic essay on text, but it's just the fact that it could be taken out of the film and put in any other of his pictures at any moment, with any character saying it and it would make no difference for the Tarkovsky buffs. It's just not my way, this constant pretentiousness.The writing isn't any good at all either. Every conversation sounds like a drunk poet's robot stumbled upon a typewriter. I don't understand why are these people saying these things on those situations which are plain weird and (I can't stress this enough) extremely slow, so I would either fell asleep or just get frustrated. Well, I'm not going to discuss this, because I've seen all of Tarkovsky's films and honestly it doesn't surprise me. I survived watching 'The Mirror' or "Ivan's Childhood', those films at least had context and meaning. But the point is that in all of the boredom and lack of sympathy that is Tarkovsky's filmography, this is his less inspired, most depressing entry.

t-viktor212 Nostalghia was the first non sci-fi movie I saw from Tarkovskij (I though understanding the audio would make it better), and maybe that was a wrong decision. It would have been better to start with the earlier movies. Now that I saw his last work though, Sacrifice, and understood it as well, I could understand this movie better. Nostalghia has a similar anti-modernism like sacrifice, various themes, and despite it's just two hours long, it's one of the slowest Tarkovskij films. This and Sacrifice represent well the director's last years of filmmaking. Although Nostalghia wasn't my favourite Tarkovskij, I still consider a masterpiece, just as Sacrifice.

film_reviewer-1 Tarkovsky is the greatest director who has ever lived, except for (the British) Hitchcock. The spiritual and religious questions are given to the audience like a one-on-one commentary while experiencing the journey of his quasi-plot.Russian cinema was so brilliant, all the way back to the theorist times of Eisenstein and his colleagues, that now I wonder why, with all that Putinesque oil money, they can't revive their cinema. Cinema was their art form. They were surely not that great at producing the visual arts, better yet at the theorizing. Despite their awful communism, the Russians were so much more advanced in cinema than Americans (who were so dependent on the theatrical story). The stumbling block was the aftermath of WWII. Should that be allowed to essentially destroy all solid cultural expression? Russians should be the leaders. (The Russians trained the Chinese and look how well they did. Why can't Russia do this for their own people?)Americans see Russians as a bunch of murderous thugs. That's what happens when you kill off journalist critics. Take a lesson from America and discredit them like they did to Dan Rather and others. Don't murder the opposition. But, of course, Tarkovsky had to even defect. As far as I know, no one defects now. Is that because there's no one left? Tarkovsky gave Russia and the world something to marvel at. Tarkovsky and the great Russian writers and composers are Russia, not just the economic warriors of late. Nostalghia is not my favorite Tarkovsky film. Still, it may contain the most relevant angst- filled situations common to modern day living. The famous candle scene is unforgettable. For the visually-minded, Tarkovsky films are not slow, just like abstract expressionism is not hard to understand. There's so much to see in his films. Whereas Hitchcock is a filmmaker's filmmaker, Tarkovsky is a painter-poet's filmmaker.