Curator Watchlist
Andrei Rublev
A towering, spiritually charged historical epic about art, faith, violence, and endurance. It is demanding and often austere, but its scale, imagery, and emotional force make it one of cinema’s essential experiences.
Curator Watchlist
A towering, spiritually charged historical epic about art, faith, violence, and endurance. It is demanding and often austere, but its scale, imagery, and emotional force make it one of cinema’s essential experiences.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 3h 3m
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring: Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Ivan Lapikov, Mykola Hrynko
An expansive Russian drama, this film focuses on the life of revered religious icon painter Andrei Rublev. Drifting from place to place in a tumultuous era, the peace-seeking monk eventually gains a reputation for his art. But after Rublev witnesses a brutal battle and unintentionally becomes involved, he takes a vow of silence and spends time away from his work. As he begins to ease his troubled soul, he takes steps towards becoming a painter once again.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Ivan Lapikov, Mykola Hrynko
A towering, spiritually charged historical epic about art, faith, violence, and endurance. It is demanding and often austere, but its scale, imagery, and emotional force make it one of cinema’s essential experiences.
Andrei Rublev is less a biopic than a vast meditation on what it means to make art in a world defined by cruelty, superstition, and collapse. Tarkovsky turns the life of a medieval icon painter into a sequence of elemental encounters: war, faith, silence, labor, doubt, and the fragile possibility of renewal. The result feels both intimate and monumental, as if history itself were being watched through the mind of an artist trying to survive it.
What makes the film extraordinary is its patience. It moves in chapters, sometimes drifting, sometimes erupting, but always with a sense that every image carries moral weight. The bell-casting sequence is a masterclass in cinematic labor and spiritual suspense, and the film’s final movement transforms artistic creation into an act of collective belief.
This is demanding cinema, but not cold cinema. Beneath the severity is deep human feeling, a reverence for endurance, and a fierce faith in the possibility that art can outlast humiliation, violence, and oblivion. It is one of the great films about making something meaningful when the world gives you every reason not to.
Eli Hayes (5★) · 2198 likes
"What is praised today is abused tomorrow. They will forget you, me, everything." I am utterly incapable of writing a review for this film, so I am not even going to try. It would be a disservice to the film, and to Tarkovsky. This is what I like to refer to as biblical cinema; I don't mean that the film itself is religious - at times it is, though I would argue its themes are more spiritual than religious... what… more
Kenji Fujishima (5★) · 1061 likes
Seven episodes in the life of the titular medieval Russian icon painter, all of which add up to one of the most vivid and detailed cinematic depictions I've ever seen of the life of an artist. From naive optimism about human nature to an abject despair that leads him to swear off art-making for about 15 years, then finally a renewal of his passion with the help of a former monk and a young bellmaker (whose obsessive quest to finish
Edgar Cochran ✝️🍋 (5★) · 941 likes
***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.*** Thanks to the power and humanism of a gripping anti-war manifesto called Ivanovo Detstvo (1962) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, his next epic project Andrey Rublyov had a considerable amount of high expectations from the Russian audience. Naturally, something that continues happening even nowadays, the film surpassed any possible human expectation, being the cinematic result a politically brutal and violent motion picture. The most obvious consequence was the film being prohibited… more
Sally Jane Black · 560 likes
All I knew going into this was that it was about an artist/monk. Perhaps I'm just grasping for meaning here, but the ending certainly suggested it might well be about filmmaking a bit, too. As Boris slowly backs away from his triumph at the end and breaks down, as the dozens who worked on the bell move in to make it ring, as the audience cheers, I could not help but think that perhaps this was some commentary on what… more
Mads Ej (2.5★) · 516 likes
This is my first Andrei Tarkovsky movie and I was a bit disappointed. I understand that it is one of the best movies ever made and it is a sin to rate it lower than 5 stars, but I just didn’t like the movie that much. The movie was very well made and Tarkovsky is without a doubt a great director. The movie was filled with beautiful shots and good effects and it was basically just well made in almost
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For viewers drawn to Tarkovsky’s metaphysical pacing, symbolic imagery, and existential searching.
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A transcendent spiritual drama centered on suffering, belief, and the face as a site of inner conflict.
A medieval philosophical film that wrestles with faith, mortality, and the silence of God.
A patient, humane portrait of labor and community with an almost sacred attention to everyday life.
A reverent yet unsentimental spiritual film with stark imagery and profound moral clarity.
A searching film about faith, sacrifice, and the burden of spiritual calling.
For its painterly images, lyrical pacing, and sense of human lives dwarfed by larger forces.
A visually exquisite historical epic that treats period life with painterly precision and fatalistic distance.
A meditative historical film that finds transcendence in landscape, ritual, and first contact.
A grand historical elegy about change, decay, and the passing of an old order.
art and artistic vocation, faith and spirituality, violence and historical trauma, silence and renewal, labor and craftsmanship, moral endurance, medieval Russia, artist versus society
spiritual epic, historical drama, arthouse, medieval Russia, black-and-white cinematography, philosophical cinema, slow cinema, war and faith, artist’s struggle, auteur classic