Ivan's Childhood

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Giuseppe F Poetic masterpiece. Absolutely a must seen movie Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/25/24 Full Review Leaburn This film was quite good 👍🏼 Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 11/30/22 Full Review Christopher B A beautifully filmed masterpiece with stunning cinematography and a great story with powerful performances, make this a wonderful work to behold. The debut film from Andrei Tarkovsky is a real gem and was a true moment of arrival for Tarkovsky in the world of cinema. He would go on to make many masterpieces that are towering works of art! This a simple story of childhood in wartime, is deeply moving and powerful. It's so universal in it's telling of the human condition and specifically how war ravages everyone and the devastating impacts on children. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 10/28/22 Full Review andrea m Alright, this was my introduction to Tarkovsky. I see the greatness in direction and photography, the crazy camera angles and transitions, the shots that are never banal in exploiting depth and shadows, the masterful use of dreams and sounds to tell more than you can see, the great B/W that fits perfectly the muddy environment. I get it. But I would never rate this movie as awesome. First, the story is quite incoherent, secondly, too many segments are just rambling with incomprehensible symbolism. Every sequence involving Masha doesn't make any sense, the well sequence too, and the apples on the carriage... If you show me something it has to be functional to the movie. If I don't get it even on a second viewing, you fail as a director (of course for me, a random guy leaving reviews on RT; I'm sure that Tarkovsky's memory will remain unscathed and movie junkies will continue to get off with this one). Still, I recommend this movie for its historical value: doing this in '62's USSR is quite remarkable. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review William L Tarkovsky's first feature film sidesteps the active, 'hot' parts of warfare to emphasize the chilling moments of quiet between the bullets when the mind starts to wander. The director implements the dreamlike atmosphere that would become his most prominent trademark in later years to present a jagged and fractured narrative in emulation of his protagonist's psyche, caught between the happy memories of his earlier years and the cruel vengeances that he now doggedly seeks as a front-line scout; in the warmer years of the Khrushchev Thaw, Ivan is now a victim of a larger conflict fighting with venom as his fuel, rather than a dogged youth who overcomes adversity through the hot-blooded beating heart of communism in his chest. Devastating and tragic without being in the least bit superficially violent, Ivan's Childhood is simultaneously dirty and beautifully shot even though it lacks anything in the way of grand tracking shots, with Tarkovsky's cinematography conveying an almost alien nature to the landscape in his efforts to display a world of conflict that molds and reshapes the innocent mind into something far more warped and irredeemable. One of the most accomplished feature directorial debuts of all time, with elements that would continued to be refined in Tarkovsky's later masterpieces. (4/5) Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 06/19/22 Full Review Audience Member My second favorite film of all time, and I'm a 52-year-old movie junkie. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/24/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Ivan's Childhood

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