Tarkovsky’s Solaris Revisited

This week, The New York Times film crit­ic A.O. Scott revis­its Solaris (watch online here), Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film adap­ta­tion of the sci-fi nov­el writ­ten by the Pol­ish author Stanisław Lem (1961). Although Tarkovsky con­sid­ered the film some­thing of an artis­tic fail­ure (and Lem turned sour on the project too), Solaris won the Grand Prix Spé­cial du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val. What’s more, Salman Rushdie lat­er called it “a sci-fi mas­ter­piece,” Roger Ebert gave it a big nod too, and Empire mag­a­zine ranked it 68th on its list of The 100 Best Films Of World Cin­e­ma. Solaris is one among many Tarkovsky films avail­able online (for free) through Google Video and Veoh, or you can always pur­chase Solaris in high qual­i­ty for­mat on DVD.

Look­ing for more movies? Vis­it our mega list of 340 Free Movies Online.