It's one of the most unusual films I've seen, a barrage of images, music and noises, shot with such an active camera we almost need seatbelts.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 28, 2022

Here is visual poetry, so much rarer in the cinema than mere lyricism. An aesthetic pleasure from beginning to end, the film like its title conjures a feeling of legend and fairytale out of the simplest, documentary-real ingredients.

| Feb 28, 2022

[Parajanov] Is particularly sensitive to the universal symbolism of nature. He uses leaves and aky and earth and water to create a mood, or to convey an emotion, with breath-taking clarity.

| Feb 28, 2022

Its principal asset as motion picture is the brilliant reproduction of ancient customs and traditional sentiments. It also has a spectacular and abundant musical score that carries much more emotion than the actors convey.

| Feb 28, 2022

The soundtrack blends folksongs, chants and atonal music which is exotic and exciting, supporting the unique camera devices. Together they seem to impart a combination of the haunting past with the immediacy of eternal things.

| Feb 28, 2022

[Parajanov], who uses color to express mood, merges current film techniques with traditional themes nd treatment. He consequently achieves more action with the camera than his cast whose stylized portrayals accent soulful and severe expressions.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 28, 2022

The images, the colour and the pipe and drum music are quite stunning -- a film for romantic escapists who do not like the normal mental exits the cinema provides.

| Feb 28, 2022

The colour photography is often beautiful and the opening scenes are full of vivid local colour, though afterwards director Sergei Paradzhanov does let things drag on rather.

| Feb 28, 2022

Intrusive though this technique can be, it combines with the marvelously atonal score and wealth of visual detail an unbroken pageantry of exotic settings and costumes to achieve a poetry of sound and motion.

| Feb 28, 2022

This timeless story, however, is served up with so much camera movement and so many tricks that the effect is ludicrous.

| Feb 28, 2022

The photography is meltingly lovely. It makes a walloping tear-jerker of pre-collectivized peasantry.

| Feb 28, 2022

The story [is] detailed by a madly-kinetic camera eye.

| Feb 28, 2022

Beautiful costumes, a fine rendition of the times in a successful folklore fashion and, above all, the swooping camera, experimental color work and an overdone, yet graceful, progression weld this into a youthfully excessive, but filmically beguiling film

| Feb 28, 2022

The story is a folk legend, presented episodically, moving at a grade and leisurely pace. A bit too much so for my tastes.

| Feb 28, 2022

Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, directed by Sergei Paradzhanov, conjures up a vivid imaginative picture of remote peasant life.

| Feb 28, 2022

Rambling and overlong, it still had the smell of life.

| Feb 28, 2022

A cinematic masterpiece, deconstructing the cinematic form and message and blowing the audience away with its multi-layered imagery.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 28, 2022

The uncommon glimpse of an isolated time and place may account for the film’s heady reception. The tale’s inept execution, however, is hard to ignore.

| Feb 28, 2022

[Paradjanov's] extraordinary sensuality combines the dreaminess of Vigo with the feeling for the natural world of Herzog.

| Feb 28, 2022

A strong candidate for one of the greatest films of all time.

| Feb 28, 2022