The Cinematheque

The best arthouse film of all time

The Guardian/The Observer critics’ poll (2013)

Transfixing and transcendent, Tarkovsky’s monumental (and monumentally beautiful) second feature is considered by many to be the finest Soviet film of the postwar era. Andrei Rublev presents several imaginary episodes in the life of its title character, a 15th-century Russian Orthodox monk who won renown as an icon painter. Little is known about the historical Rublev; Tarkovsky’s visionary masterpiece renders him as a man clinging desperately to his faith in God and art in a world of overwhelming cruelty and barbarism. The Soviet authorities objected to the film for a host of reasons (violence, formalism, ​“historical inaccuracy,” its depiction of the artist’s plight under repressive rule) and shelved it for five years. A version was permitted to screen at the 1969 Cannes festival, where it won the International Critics Prize. Andrei Rublev screens here in Tarkovsky’s preferred 183-minute cut. 

In Russian, Tatar, and Italian with English subtitles

Advisory: Andrei Rublev includes a scene of unsimulated graphic violence involving a horse

“Imperative viewing … A film of spiritual power and epic grandeur … It may be Tarkovsky’s greatest work.”

Philip French, The Observer