Filmwell: Ron Reed reviews Andrei Rublev

It must be Andrei Tarkovsky week or something. First, Doug Cummings reviews two Tarkovsky-related documentaries and now my Filmwell comrade Ron Reed has just posted this review of Andrei Rublev: The Passion According To Andrei:

It was only during my second viewing that I started even to appreciate this daunting, opaque film. It took a third time through (with two friends who had never met, each of whom counted this their uncontested favorite film) to begin actually to like it. But it was only after working my way through the film scene-by-scene, followed a fifth complete viewing, that the power of Andrei Rublev truly took hold of me, and I came to share my friends’ enthusiasm. I can’t understand why the film didn’t speak to me when first I encountered it, it lives so close to the central concerns of my life. In all its mystery and concreteness, Tarkovsky’s masterpiece has become essential to my faith, speaking as no other film does to my understanding of the place of my art in the world, and in the kingdom of God. And in no way that I can express in words, it reassures and strengthens my resolve to face the inevitability of suffering that comes to every human life.