PG, 165 mins
Patience is also strained, but well rewarded, by Solaris (1972), part of the Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective at the National Film Theatre. It’s Ingmar Bergman in space as benumbed figures grapple with life’s spiritual and existential conundrums in the sterile gloom of a space station under the influence of an incomprehensible alien intelligence.
The film is undoubtedly over-long but the way its narrative obtuseness and sense of mystery come to represent the limits of human understanding stays with you. It makes Steven Soderbergh’s more recent version of the same Stanislaw Lem novel seem like an afterthought.