Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #29 (tied with Shoah)
Between Andrei Rublev and now Stalker, my primary impression of Andrei Tarkovsky as a director is that he's a methodical man, a guy who likes to let both his shots and ideas linger for the viewer, letting the larger ramifications of what he's depicting on-screen sink in for the audience and leave them with plenty to ponder once the entire motion picture is finished playing. This slow-burn approach sometimes left me a bit cold in Stalker (though that should be taken less as a major critique of the movie and more on me being sometimes unresponsive to certain slower pieces of storytelling), but there's no denying Tarkovsky has an incredibly evocative way of creating cinema that's both bold and intriguing.
