It’s hard to imagine a more jointly artful and mind-numbingly off-putting cinematic experience... Father and Son is the virtual definition of tedium.
Comment
07/13/04
Father and Son (2004)
70
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:40
Fresh:28
Rotten:12
Average Rating:6.4/10
Runtime: 83 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: Acclaimed filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (RUSSIAN ARK) brings us this sensual study of the bond between a strapping Russian father (Andrey Schetinin) and his soldier son (Aleksey Neymsyshev). In a... [More]
Starring: Andrey Schetinin, Aleksey Neymyshev, Alexander Razbash, Fedor Lavrov
Director: Aleksandr Sokurov
Reviews for Father and Son
Poised and teasing in a way that might incite less patient viewers to madness. But you don't come to Sokurov for his narrative agility, you come for his rhapsodic longueurs.
07/09/04
The opacity of the characters and situations prevents the film from having any true emotional impact.
07/07/04
Top CriticIt's purely touching.
07/02/04
Top CriticOne has the feeling the director has let himself go off the deep end regarding the romantic and idealizing tendencies that, for better or worse, characterize much of his work.
06/29/04
Top CriticA magnificently shot exercise in tedium.
06/25/04
Nothing much happens by way of plot in the course of Father and Son, but it offers a fresh and often startling vision of one of the most fundamental relationships between human beings.
06/24/04
Top CriticThe emotions of the piece pulse in and out like submerged things coming to light, or visions in a trance.
06/23/04
Sokurov vividly evokes the emotions underlying paternal love and filial devotion.
06/18/04
A feast for the eyes.
06/18/04
It's a film that will polarize audiences -- some will squirm in their seats while others will go with the art and flow.
06/18/04
For those not familiar with Sokurov’s work, the opaque, exclusive dialogue, surreal reality and the cryptic relationships may come across as ponderous and pretentious.
06/18/04
Sokurov firmly establishes his film as a spiritual parable; the characters’ every glance and touch seems a cosmic gesture...
06/18/04
Like most of Sokurov's movies, this oblique parable is mysterious, elliptical, irresistible.
06/17/04
a unique, striking, poetic expression of the tumultuous emotions shared by a man and his boy at the crossroads of their lives.
06/17/04
Alexander Sokurov's new film is like a dream, or a half-translated poem. Its images and emotions are memorable and vivid, but its intentions often feel stubbornly hermetic.
06/17/04
Top CriticA more naked movie than Father and Son is hard to imagine and would be impossible to watch.
06/17/04
Has the tedium without the trance.
06/17/04
Borders on the risible but, because Sokurov is Sokurov, this exalted, wacky scenario ... is amazingly staged, inventively edited, and rich in audio layering, with camera placements that sometimes verge on the Brakhagian.
06/15/04
Numbness instead of joy is what permeates the masculine, military-ish world of 'Father and Son.'
06/15/04
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