Kapow!

The Sacrifice blew me away. I'd seen Tarkovsky's magisterial B&W icon Andrei Rubilev, which is powerful, mysterious, and beautiful as a glacier--and whose narrative moves at about the same pace as an ancient field of boulder-chewing ice. The Sacrifice is a completely different film, and manages nearly to out-Bergman Bergman (the film is in Swedish and features Erland Josephsen [Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage]). We pinball from the beautiful and sublime to the bleak and hopeless and back again, and there's not merely the typical cinematic Swedish madness of a repressed familial sort, but a madness that threatens the entire Earth. God does play dice with the universe, and Tarkovsky allows his camera lovingly to linger amongst grass and trees while Erland as poet/actor/innalectual Alexander waxes indignant about the abuses of Man.