Andrei Rublev

(Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky) (1966)

The great painter of iconography in medieval Russia is given a splendid, challenging (and long) tribute in this startling chain of magnificently filmed events, the mud and the blood and the tears, the acts of ruin and of creation making a kind of gritty surrealism over seven loosely connected episodes, the kind of picture Dostoevsky might make.  Patience is repaid with interest.