Come and See

Elem Klimov made Come and See in 1985, after Soviet censors had blocked the script for eight years. It was finally approved as part of the official 40th-anniversary commemoration of Victory Day, and it won the Golden Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival the same year. Few late-Soviet films have held a place in the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll; this one stood at number 21 in the 2022 critics' chart.

Occupied Belarus, 1943. Flyora, a thirteen-year-old village boy played by the non-professional Aleksei Kravchenko, joins the local partisans and is plunged into the Nazi Einsatzgruppen reprisals against his homeland, part of the wider campaign in which the Wehrmacht and SS destroyed 628 Belarusian villages along with their inhabitants. Klimov used live ammunition in several scenes, and Kravchenko visibly ages across the 142-minute running time, partly because of the real psychological toll of the shoot. Klimov had begun the project shortly after his wife, the director Larisa Shepitko, died in a car accident in 1979, and Come and See is in part a memorial to her unfinished career.

The title comes from the Book of Revelation. Its formal innovations (Steadicam tracking almost unknown in Soviet productions of the period, inarticulate moans on the soundtrack, stares straight into the camera that break the fourth wall) have influenced filmmakers from Terrence Malick to Klimov's Russian and Ukrainian successors. Klimov made no other features after it. He felt he had exhausted what cinema could do.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most uncompromising film ever made about the Eastern Front, and one of the very few that earns the cliché of unwatchable greatness. Nothing else in this catalogue hits as hard.