Preview data: all rankings, scores, votes, refresh labels, methodology, testing and editorial-process statements in Top 49 are illustrative demo content, not live measurements or documented reviews.
#15 in Greatest Films
of 20 ranked entries
Andrei Tarkovsky · 1966
Eight loosely joined episodes about a painter who barely paints on screen. The bell-casting sequence is one of the great sustained passages in cinema. Recorded specifics: year 1966, director Andrei Tarkovsky, country USSR. Panel highlighted bell-casting episode, medieval Russia rendered without romance and colour reveal at the close. The reservation on record is suppressed for years; multiple cuts circulate.
Score breakdown
Each criterion is scored independently, then combined using the weights published on Greatest Films.
On the record
| Year | 1966 |
|---|---|
| Director | Andrei Tarkovsky |
| Country | USSR |
| Runtime | 3h 25m |
| Score | 8.1 |
Panel verdict
What it gets right
Where it gives ground
1 appearance
From the same list
Orson Welles · 1941
A first feature that treated deep focus, overlapping sound and non-linear structure as available tools rather than experiments. Its influence is so total it now reads as ordinary.
Yasujirō Ozu · 1953
A film about adult children too busy for their parents, staged almost entirely from a seated height. The restraint is not gentleness — it is precision.
Akira Kurosawa · 1954
The template for the assembled-team film, and still better constructed than anything it inspired. Every one of the seven is legible as a person before the battle starts.
Vittorio De Sica · 1948
Non-professional actors, real streets, and a plot that fits in one sentence. Neorealism at its most economical and its most devastating.
Francis Ford Coppola · 1972
A family drama that happens to be a crime film, lit far darker than a studio would normally permit. Every scene is about who is in the room and who is not.
Stanley Kubrick · 1968
Kubrick spent the final act abandoning narrative entirely and trusted the audience to follow. Effects work done without a computer that has still not been embarrassed by anything since.
Akira Kurosawa · 1950
Four accounts of one event, none reconcilable, and the film declines to arbitrate. It gave the language a term for the problem it describes.
Alfred Hitchcock · 1958
Hitchcock reveals the twist two-thirds through and turns a mystery into a study of obsession. The most uncomfortable film he ever made about his own preoccupations.
Top 49 rankings are editorial. Scores are produced from the published criteria on each list and are refreshed on the cadence stated there. Figures shown across this section are curated demonstration data.