The Sacrifice

There are echoes of Bergman (of course) and of Chekhov, and once or twice I found myself thinking, most unexpectedly, of Heartbreak House.

This is pure Tarkovsky, with all the perfectly composed long camera takes and ineffable mystery of the soul that defined his work.

In The Sacrifice, the cryptic Tarkovsky style helps create a towering cathedral.

As The Sacrifice comes full circle, returning to that spindly tree by the sea and its nurturing, the film itself emerges as a symbolic gesture of great emotional impact.

Only those who still quiver at the shopworn lament that advancing technology is destroying the world will find the philosophizing vital in this bookish stupor.

A grand, unworldly, even antiworldly religious vision that depends on its perfect pitch to avoid absurdity and bathos.

... Few films deliver such an exquisite encounter with a cinematic artist of the highest order.

The most lasting answers in The Sacrifice ultimately are not the verbal questions that confound [Tarkovsky], but the visual beauties, one by one, that he shows us so clearly.

A plentiful and elaborate work of art... Still, a lot of the scenario is rather trite.

A film by a genius because of its gravity and difficulty, packed with a conceptual density and bearer of a quiet scream of a desperate optimism. [Full Review in Spanish]