Tarkovsky sets the stage for the rest of his career with Andrei Rublev...

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 25, 2025

Tarkovsky's directing is beyond praise and the picture of an age that the film builds up is approached only by such acknowledged masterpieces as Throne of Blood or The Seventh Seal.

| Sep 24, 2024

In many ways, Andrei Rublev is truly about the impermanence of art. No matter how much money and power funds it, all art can be erased.

| Original Score: A | Feb 28, 2024

Dazzling in its boundless ambition...

| Original Score: B | Feb 7, 2023

The film clocks in at more than three hours, but feels only half as long with themes of self, religion, art and freedom perforating each episode.

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

I think what [Rublev] truly can't forgive is the world[.]

| Jul 1, 2020

The biography itself is awkwardly narrated and does not move us. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Jul 30, 2019

We are forced to wonder if this magnificent art must have been carried through trauma to reach the ultimate seat of grace.

| Jul 30, 2019

The stark black and white imagery, accompanied by the hushed sound design with its wordless vocals and tolling bells, immerses us in a dream that feels at once sacred and profane.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 3, 2019

...a sprawling historical biography that sought to connect a godless society with the medieval monasticism that defined them as a separate ethnocultural entity.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 29, 2018

Among the most startling movie scenes of them all, a climax that is visual, emotional, and the patient result of depicting process-craft and narrative alike-as tactile poetics of detail, gesture, mud, rain, fear and hope.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Dec 26, 2018

What makes the film so powerful is how Tarkovsky's vision transcends the mere people politics of its frame to conjure an idea about Russian history and the transience of man.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 31, 2018

As Andrei Rublev's narrative and themes pose us a challenge, so too does its climax.

| Original Score: A | Oct 17, 2018

May be one of the most impressive portraits of an artist ever committed to film, if mostly because it also transcends its subject as a masterful examination of medieval Russia.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 17, 2018

a film of intense yearning that uses the medieval painter as a launching point for artistic and philosophical inquiry, which necessarily makes the film narratively disjointed and sometimes challenging to follow

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 17, 2018

Draining as it is to endure, Andrei Rublev is an intensely devoted act of respect for the artists whose brilliance and courage were equally essential to keeping the Christian flame burning through the darkest hours.

| Aug 30, 2018

You may dread being ground down by this extraordinary film, but fear not. It will bear you aloft.

| Aug 27, 2018

It evinces a complex understanding of spirituality and faith that would inform all of Andrei Tarkovsky's subsequent films.

| Aug 21, 2018

Tarkovsky's version of an indifferent world is inflected with the spirituality that is ever-present in his work, a sense that while we may be on our own, we are never quite alone.

| Aug 21, 2018

It is one of the most profound and moving experiences that cinema has ever conveyed.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 11, 2016