Impressive work. It challenges us, whether we are people of faith or not. In a dramatically fantastic artistic career, Stalker is Tarkobvky’s greatest achievement, and one of film’s greatest accomplishments, as well.

| Original Score: A+ | Feb 29, 2024

This is a film that sets itself apart from the rest for subtle reasons. It doesn’t jump out at you as something that is daring or audacious and you do have to dig a bit deeper in order to properly engage with it.

| Original Score: B | Feb 7, 2023

The opening is one of the most gripping and visionary moments I have ever seen in the cinema.

| May 4, 2022

No one tops Tarkovsky's ability for immersion, and the metaphysical enigma of Stalker is one of cinema's most impressive achievements.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 8, 2020

There is no denying Tarkovsky's unwavering vision to create something so unique and transcendental. {Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 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.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 7, 2020

Profoundly and fundamentally about the mood it creates and the atmosphere it evokes.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 22, 2020

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.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 4, 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.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 28, 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.

| Feb 7, 2019

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.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 11, 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.

| Feb 14, 2018

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.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 9, 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 21, 2017

A bleak sleepwalk into the heart of darkness.

| Aug 9, 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.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 31, 2017

an emotionally and philosophically intense experience that rewards patience and attention and all but demands repeat viewings

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 24, 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.

| Original Score: B | Jun 27, 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 18, 2017