All 10 Andrei Tarkovsky Movies Ranked (Best to Worst)

Drifting across rusted tanks, poisoned marshlands, and verdant anomalies, this metaphysical expedition follows three men journeying into a forbidden territory reputed to grant one's deepest subconscious wish. Through Edward Artemyev's drone-infused sound design and Alexander Knyazhinsky's sepia-to-color tracking shots, the physical landscape transforms into an exteriorized map of the human soul. Anatoly Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko, and Alexander Kaidanovsky deliver career-defining work as ideological avatars of cynicism, logic, and battered faith. It represents the absolute summit of Tarkovsky's artistic ambition, balancing political parable against existential inquiry with unmatched formal control.

Refusing chronological linearity entirely, this hypnotic stream of consciousness folds childhood recollections, archival war footage, domestic quarrels, and the resonant poetry of Arseny Tarkovsky into a single unified temporal tapestry. Margarita Terekhova provides a monumental dual performance as both the narrator's mother and estranged wife, embodying generations of Russian endurance against shifting interior light and sudden gusts of wind rippling through open fields. It is cinema elevated to pure associative verse. Within the canon, it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Stalker, representing his most radical structural achievement and an irreplaceable pinnacle of autobiographical art.

Unfolding across eight fragmented vignettes across medieval Russia, this colossal study of a monastic painter navigating plague, Tartar invasions, and personal artistic paralysis remains an untouchable triumph of historical realism. Vadim Yusov's widescreen cinematography captures muddy brutality with unforgiving tactile weight, culminating in the transcendent bell-casting sequence that affirms the triumphant endurance of the creative spirit under absolute tyranny. Though historically suppressed by Soviet authorities, this epic marks the moment Tarkovsky moved past conventional narrative architecture into monumental myth-making, easily securing its status directly beneath his two unassailable 1970s masterworks.

Commissioned as Mosfilm's highbrow answer to Kubrick, this haunting psychological drama shifts its gaze inward, examining how humanity carries its own unresolved guilt and remorse into the stars. Donatas Banionis brings bruised gravity to psychologist Kris Kelvin, while Natalya Bondarchuk delivers an astonishing, heartbreaking performance as the resurrected phantom wife born from an oceanic planet's psychic manifestations. The pacing is hypnotic, trading interstellar spectacle for decaying earthly textures and Bach chorales. It remains an all-time genre touchstone, slightly edged out of the top tier only because its source-material obligations occasionally push against the director's purest poetic instincts.

Bursting with extraordinary visual bravura, this Venice Golden Lion winner turns a World War II reconnaissance scout's grim trajectory into a tragedy of stolen innocence. Striking chiaroscuro photography captures the stark contrasts between birch forests and scorched riverbanks, while lyrical dream sequences—filled with falling apples and sun-drenched beaches—punctuate the boy's consuming obsession with vengeance. Nikolay Burlyaev's feral, hollow-eyed performance anchors the sensory assault. While more conventionally plotted than his later epics, this breathtaking feature debut stands as one of the most astonishing first works in screen history, bridging Soviet montage with his emergent, fluid spirituality.

Set against the misty hills, sulfur baths, and crumbling stone abbeys of Tuscany, this deeply melancholic meditation charts a homesick Russian scholar's spiritual kinship with an eccentric village hermit. Tonino Guerra's script pares narrative down to elemental basics, culminating in an unbroken, nine-minute single take of Oleg Yankovsky attempting to carry a lit candle across a drained mineral pool without extinguishing the flame. It is a grueling exercise in cinematic devotion. While occasionally bordering on solemn self-parody, the picture remains a profoundly moving portrait of displaced identity, paving the way for his final Scandinavian masterwork.

Filmed on the wind-scoured shores of Gotland with Ingmar Bergman's legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist, this eschatological chamber drama contemplates human self-annihilation at the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Erland Josephson is magnetic as an aging intellectual who vows to sacrifice all worldly possessions in exchange for the world's salvation, leading to an astonishing six-minute tracking shot capturing the literal immolation of his country house. Produced under the shadow of terminal cancer, the film feels palpably urgent yet somewhat claustrophobic compared to his earlier triumphs, functioning as a noble, austere farewell rather than an expansion of his aesthetic horizon.

Constructed as a diploma graduation project at the State Institute of Cinematography, this charming forty-six-minute drama chronicles the fleeting camaraderie between an introverted young violinist and a compassionate road worker. Vadim Yusov's vibrant primary-color cinematography and dynamic street-level framing show the director absorbing French New Wave impulses while cultivating his own fascination with water puddles and reflective glass. Though lightweight and unburdened by the heavy metaphysical themes of his mature filmography, this delightful short demonstrates exceptional compositional mastery, proving that even his apprentice efforts brimmed with innate visual elegance.

Shot on lightweight video and 16mm film during location scouting across rural Italy, this poetic documentary functions as an unvarnished window into an auteur wrestling with creative burnout and foreign displacement. Tarkovsky and screenwriter Tonino Guerra engage in rambling, candid dialogues regarding architecture, cultural memory, and the modern commercialization of cinema, punctuated by letters from aspiring young filmmakers. Far more of a historical sketchbook than a standalone artistic achievement, it remains indispensable for scholars charting the transition into his exile period, even if it lacks the breathtaking aesthetic rigor of his formal features.

Staged as a student exercise adapting Ernest Hemingway's classic short story of cold-blooded hitmen waiting inside a small-town diner, this nineteen-minute short features Tarkovsky alongside fellow VGIK classmates Marika Beiku and Aleksandr Gordon. While Vasili Shukshin shines in an early role, the piece leans heavily on American film noir tropes, high-contrast shadows, and cramped interior blocking that reveal little of the director's future thematic identity. It is an engaging, historically fascinating piece of institutional training, but fundamentally ranks as the director's rawest and most conventional academic footprint.