Ivan's Childhood

No other director is simultaneously so precise and so otherworldly.

Director Andrei Tarkovsky has mixed daring with poetry in making this film: he shows the Soviet hero as an individual troubled with the doubts and complexities of other humans.

While the emotional weight of Ivan is clear from the first frames -- Tarkovsky doesn't stray from making us feel the pain of Ivan's world -- there is that sense of music the director is so intent on conveying.

Beauty, poetry and sadness are certainly lodged in its brief dramatic span, to be seized and embraced by anybody who will give a compassionate mind to it.

The work in which the remarkable nature of [Tarkovsky's] talent first shone through.

[A] subdued depiction of warfare as mostly a lot of waiting around for brief explosive action... The orphan kid - who several times describes himself as 'jittery' - is a more openly shell-shocked version of all the adults around him.

Tarkovsky pays full attention to the squalor and pity of war but never loses his sense of poetry.

Unmissable.

It was the caveat of the profound possibilities of eastern cinema, effectively heralding the discovery of one of the most perceptive minds to ever stand behind a movie camera.

Pairing [poetic] images with fragmented characters and Ivan's single-minded desire to get back in the fray, the result is disturbing and affecting.

It feels stylistically as fresh as if it had been made yesterday -- even to some very striking use of handheld camerawork. It's really something of a masterpiece.