A rich and rewarding film, a deeply humanist work of art that is as tender as it is bracing.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 6, 2019

Alexandra is a film made by someone who wants to talk, which is an admirable gesture. It's just not the correct one.

| Nov 27, 2017

The film had so beautifully evoked this tenor of decamped emotional ties, of a people cared for forever traveling away from home, by conflating the grandmother's searching familial love with the isolated, forlorn faces of the soldiers...

| Nov 17, 2017

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 16, 2011

| Original Score: B | Nov 16, 2011

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 16, 2011

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 16, 2011

| Original Score: A- | Sep 7, 2011

An unusual masterpiece atmospheric anti-war film that is an example of cinema as pure feeling.

| Original Score: A+ | Sep 28, 2009

Eccentric and tender, it is a picture out for grace rather than polemics, and it finds enough to make one see emotional intimacy anew

| Aug 27, 2009

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.

| Oct 24, 2008

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 26, 2008

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.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 26, 2008

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.

| Sep 26, 2008

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.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 26, 2008

It's a film of small details rather than big gestures...and all the more powerful for it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 26, 2008

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.

| Sep 26, 2008

A bone-weariness pervades every inch of the film; even the light is bleached dry of vitality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 26, 2008

Apart from a thoroughly irritating background track of schmaltzy classical music, this is Sokurov at his shortest and most digestible.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 26, 2008

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.

| Original Score: 4/6 | Sep 26, 2008