Andrei Rublev

A new year dawns. The iron bell tolls. The sinister cycle begins again. Bleak Cinema begins 2026 with the rhapsodic misery of Andrei Rublev, the mudsoaked second feature from Andrei Tarkovsky. This atypical biopic links the epic to the intimate in its portrait of Rublev, a Russian saint and painter. Tarkovsky uses Rublev’s life as a means to meditate on the relationship between art, mortality, and the divine.

Throughout his films, Tarkovsky exercises curiosity towards the relationship between time and cinema. Time exists in Tarkovsky films as it does in reality: Glacial, boundless, and apathetic. In Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky uses his sensibility to illustrate medieval Russian with both tangibility and transcendence.