It's long, stately and po-faced (all reasons why Tarkovsky seems faintly unfashionable these days), but if it's extended, beautifully composed tracking shots you want, he's your man.
Comment
12/07/07
The Sacrifice (1986)
79 %
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 24
Fresh: 19
Rotten:5
Average Rating: 7.2/10
Runtime: 4 hrs 6 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
Synopsis: Set in Sweden, Andrei Tarkovsky's last film follows the travails of wealthy patriarch Alexander (Erland Josephson), a former actor and critic who lives in a remote home on the edge of the Baltic Sea. One year on his birthday, a sudden... [More]
Starring: Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood, Valerie Mairesse
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky, Sven Nykvist
DVD Info
Reviews for The Sacrifice
Invaluable pointers on narrative patience, spiritual yearning and technical finesse.
12/07/07
Brilliant and audacious, with one of the most extraordinary final sequences in modern cinema.
12/07/07
Top Critic A fitting epitaph for a great artist. Every frame could be hung on a wall, the script is supremely thoughtful and the performances are universally excellent.
12/07/07
A difficult film - slow-paced, unashamedly theatrical and heavily laden with philosophy – yet a profoundly satifying one: a rewarding display of filmmaking mastery that forms a mystical and enigmatic coda to a legendary career.
12/07/07
For all its Swedish trimmings, the long, syrup-slow takes are unmistakably Tarkovsky’s, and it’s these that provide this arthouse disaster movie with its mesmerising power.
12/07/07
Tarkovsky’s film will be forever confined to a dark cul-de-sac in the arthouse ghetto because of its sheer monotony.
12/07/07
Top Critic
For those willing to acccept the tenets of Tarkovsky’s cinema of spiritual quest, his esoteric notions of Christian iconography and his obscure approach to cinematic meaning, the film can seem nothing less than miraculous.
06/24/06
To awaken the spiritual hunger for something beyond materialistic, desacrilized modern existence was the burden of Tarkovsky, cinematic poet laureate of the Russian soul.
10/27/04
The Sacrifice is a stunningly beautiful film that holds your attention even while you feel slightly stunned, in a less welcome way, by what is actually going on.
08/30/04
Top Critic True film devotees will appreciate the mystery and the spiritual allusiveness of The Sacrifice.
08/26/04
It is a poetic vision, filled with the symbolism peculiar to Tarkovsky's imagination. It is also a visually stunning, hauntingly beautiful, brilliant piece of art.
07/30/03
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