Every Friday Chris hand-selects a streaming recommendation for your weekend.
This Friday’s Featured Flick
Ivan’s Childhood on Hulu
THE SCENE
THE DETAILS
DIRECTOR: Andrei Tarkovsky
WRITER: Vladimir Bogomolov, Mikhail Papava
CAST: Nikolay Burlyaev, Valentin Zubkov, Evgeniy Zharikov, Andrey Konchalovskiy
GENRE: Drama / War
RUNTIME: 95 min
YEAR: 1962
THE PLOT (via Letterboxd)
Poetic journey through the shards and shadows of one boy’s war-ravaged youth.
THE REASON
CONFESSION: It took me no less than three attempts to get through Solaris the first time. The work of Andrei Tarkovsky is etherial and haunting, but it can also be intimidating to approach, especially for the very first time.
Ivan’s Childhood is a perfect gateway drug to the poetic world of Tarkovsky. You can sense his fingerprints in the evocative, dreamlike images and emotionally arresting tableaus, but it’s also a less challenging endeavor than the likes of Stalker. And at just over an hour and a half, watching it twice would still be less of a commitment than Andrie Rublev – which I’ll admit I still have yet to endured.
I challenge you to give Ivan’s Childhood just half an hour of your life this weekend. If you’re not fully invested in the world by that time, you can turn it off and go watch Office Space on TBS again. But I bet you won’t turn it off. I bet you finish the entire thing without even realizing it. And I bet it will give you a desire to seek out more by the delicate Russian auteur.
Watch Ivan’s Childhood now on Hulu.
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