Mirror

Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror, completed in 1974 and released in 1975, was understood at the time as a deeply autobiographical film, but Soviet critics struggled to extract a clear message from it. The cultural authorities classified it as a third-category release, which severely limited cinema bookings, and Tarkovsky later said this was the film that convinced him he would have to leave the Soviet Union. Mirror sits in the top tier of every Sight & Sound poll, and it placed at number 31 in the 2022 critics' chart.

A dying poet, never seen on screen, drifts between layered memories of his wartime childhood, newsreel fragments covering forty years of twentieth-century history (the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Soviet border war, the rise of the atom bomb) and dreams of his mother as a young woman. Margarita Terekhova plays both the young mother and the poet's estranged ex-wife, and the doubling carries the film's central idea: that a mother cannot be told apart from a lover, or a childhood from the country it was lived in. Anatoly Solonitsyn, the doctor in the field, was one of Tarkovsky's most reliable collaborators.

There is no plot in any conventional sense. The film is organised by the rhythms of memory, and documentary, dream and lived experience all carry the same weight as images. Among working filmmakers Mirror is the Tarkovsky film named most often: Béla Tarr, Carlos Reygadas and Apichatpong Weerasethakul have all called it foundational.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: It proved that cinema could work the way memory works, with the same density and the same unresolved emotion. Few works in the medium resist summary so completely.