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Wonderful character development!

Good movie but grossly overrated

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

I have never seen a film so visually beautiful. However, it is devoid of plot. My review can't contain spoilers as there's nothing to spoil. Just watch the incredible cinematic beauty.

This must be the single most boring experience I've witnessed in film. I mean, regardless of the purpose of cinema, art or entertainment, at least show me something. That's the one thing I needed, something, I got nothing.It's amazing how the plot seems interesting at first, yet the film just doesn't get into it. This Andrei guy and his lady interpreter go to Italy to study a composer. Nothing of the sort matters. This composer is never mentioned again after one mindless conversation about it. I don't recall any useful information from anyone. I don't recall any scene in this film at all actually. I just don't remember how this film looks anymore, because it's incredibly boring and unimpressive. It could've been a good 5 minute short. But it was painful. Phisically painful.I didn't get any character development whatsoever. The protagonist haves this weird visions of his wife, that are only with the purpose of filler, nothing more; the interpreter kind of wants to have him but she doesn't really try; there's this weird obsession with a candle going through an empty pool; non of this is either connected, interesting, useful, explained or later developed. It just kind of exists. I'm left with absolutely nothing. Tarkovsky always does that to me, he just show me some pictures he likes and I'm suppose to do all the thinking. Now he went full speed.It takes... minutes... for the scenes... to go... anywhere zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz(Just because I don't like to excruciatingly bore myself to death, that doesn't mean I enjoy "cars exploding", like many people would say. That's just being the most pretentious you can get.)And there is no plot! The characters act like lost aliens that just try to imitate humans. Everyone moves slowly, there's no reward at the ending and I just can't grasp anything interesting from anywhere. I'm starving here!Also, the part of Domenico's speech, that seems to be one of the "highlights" people praise, has "Tarkovsky" written all over it... and not in the good way. This speech is fully out of place, extremely overlong, pretentious, meaningless and dull. I mean, it's not that it wouldn't be an interesting artistic essay on text, but it's just the fact that it could be taken out of the film and put in any other of his pictures at any moment, with any character saying it and it would make no difference for the Tarkovsky buffs. It's just not my way, this constant pretentiousness.The writing isn't any good at all either. Every conversation sounds like a drunk poet's robot stumbled upon a typewriter. I don't understand why are these people saying these things on those situations which are plain weird and (I can't stress this enough) extremely slow, so I would either fell asleep or just get frustrated. Well, I'm not going to discuss this, because I've seen all of Tarkovsky's films and honestly it doesn't surprise me. I survived watching 'The Mirror' or "Ivan's Childhood', those films at least had context and meaning. But the point is that in all of the boredom and lack of sympathy that is Tarkovsky's filmography, this is his less inspired, most depressing entry.

This is nowhere near the same level as Solaris or even the similarly plodding Stalker. It's pretty much a poster boy for pretentious cinema that your hillbilly friend mocks you for watching. For all that, it's not a total loss.The images are beautiful.But the characters bounce off of each other like pool balls instead of actually interacting. We never learn anything about them past superficiality. She hates him because he's not a real Russian. Or something. The New Age philosophizing would be embarrassed in the Barnes and Noble "New Age" section of books. (The only thing that saves it is the location among the ruins. Otherwise, just lock the loony up; he has nothing to offer.) We are beaten over the head repeatedly with imagery whose "meaning" we figured out 10 minutes in. Etc.I have a high tolerance for modern film; I love the "nothing happening" films of Antonioni, like L'Aventurra. But I have to agree with some others on here who were saying "Only a film student could love this movie," and I'll wager that they are the ones keeping it so highly rated.

Nostalghia was the first non sci-fi movie I saw from Tarkovskij (I though understanding the audio would make it better), and maybe that was a wrong decision. It would have been better to start with the earlier movies. Now that I saw his last work though, Sacrifice, and understood it as well, I could understand this movie better. Nostalghia has a similar anti-modernism like sacrifice, various themes, and despite it's just two hours long, it's one of the slowest Tarkovskij films. This and Sacrifice represent well the director's last years of filmmaking. Although Nostalghia wasn't my favourite Tarkovskij, I still consider a masterpiece, just as Sacrifice.