Tarkovsky’s work redefined how the language of cinema can be used to tell stories. He only made seven feature films during his lifetime, yet even if he had only made The Sacrifice, he’d have earned his place among the greats.

| Nov 22, 2024

... Few films deliver such an exquisite encounter with a cinematic artist of the highest order.

| Nov 6, 2024

The most lasting answers in The Sacrifice ultimately are not the verbal questions that confound [Tarkovsky], but the visual beauties, one by one, that he shows us so clearly.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 19, 2023

A plentiful and elaborate work of art... Still, a lot of the scenario is rather trite.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 5, 2020

A film by a genius because of its gravity and difficulty, packed with a conceptual density and bearer of a quiet scream of a desperate optimism. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Mar 10, 2020

A stunning and brilliant summation of a legendary career, and Kino's sumptuous treatment of it is befitting of its stature in cinema history.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 5, 2019

I was fascinated by the unusual elements on display - the inscrutable story structure, the deceptively complex long takes, the way that clashing visual and narrative philosophies bleed into each other with a dreamlike logic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 21, 2018

There are echoes of Bergman (of course) and of Chekhov, and once or twice I found myself thinking, most unexpectedly, of Heartbreak House.

| Jul 7, 2018

This is pure Tarkovsky, with all the perfectly composed long camera takes and ineffable mystery of the soul that defined his work.

| Jun 7, 2018

Tartovsky's last film is a lyrical plea for spiritualism and a warning about the dangers of runaway science.

| Original Score: B | May 23, 2018

The dread chill of the film is a stark reminder of the zeitgeist at the time, which was full of nuclear doom.... What constitutes the tragedy here is what is left open to question.

| May 21, 2016

In The Sacrifice, the cryptic Tarkovsky style helps create a towering cathedral.

| Aug 4, 2015

As The Sacrifice comes full circle, returning to that spindly tree by the sea and its nurturing, the film itself emerges as a symbolic gesture of great emotional impact.

| Aug 4, 2015

...haunted by the gap between human yearning and ultimate understanding.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 17, 2014

Only those who still quiver at the shopworn lament that advancing technology is destroying the world will find the philosophizing vital in this bookish stupor.

| Nov 11, 2014

A grand, unworldly, even antiworldly religious vision that depends on its perfect pitch to avoid absurdity and bathos.

| Nov 10, 2014

At least close to being a great film. It's a film that lingers in the mind -- not in the least because it's so open to interpretation.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 2, 2012

The few insecurities in the filmmaking, which stick out in contrast to his Russian works, are easily overlooked by how masterful other scenes are and the impressiveness of the imagery.

| Original Score: 8.6/10 | Aug 18, 2011

Visually potent ... humblingly vast ... [and yet] the movie oscillates between compelling our thunderstruck confidence and testing our patience with unfulfilled promise and highbrow clichs.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 8, 2011

Tarkovsky punctuates this so-called "plot" with many, many stunningly poetic images, mostly filmed in long takes with delicate tracking shots.

| Jan 29, 2009