If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Seriously people, a poem? You can't be serious. The film has merits, some lovely shots, some good mood stuff, but I found it utterly painful and pretentious... self conscious and messy. Apparently Tarkovsky stated that the artist himself does not necessarily know the meaning of an image but is compelled to express his vision. What a grandiose sense of self... guided by God, I suppose. Taking a pile of snippets of history and then blurting them out and sticking bits together with an almost invisible narrative does not make "poetry". I didn't mind the occasional sloppy filmmaking, like the sight of the tracks on the right of frame in the last shot, or the microphone shadow in one of the dull dialogue scenes, but really did mind that it was just utterly painful to watch. Perhaps I am not intelligent or deep enough to understand this poem. Or perhaps this is the most over-rated movie in history.

A little boy turns on a television, and watches the flickering static lines. A psychiatrist uses hypnosis and laying on of hands to treat a bigger boy with a speech impediment, while the shadow of the filmmakers' boom microphone is clearly seen on the wall. A voice-over by a man explains where you should get off the road towards their house. A man does get off the road and initiates a conversation with a woman who is not the woman the little boy watches washing her hair. The ceiling comes crashing down. Another house (?) burns to the ground in the pouring rain. Later, newsreel footage follows. Bombs fall on Spain and a rooster is slaughtered. And so it goes, on an on.It's artsy and all, and with a little imagination you can figure out what the 'mirror' in the title refers to. A man, who lost his father early and had all sorts of problems both with his mother and his wife, reflects on his troubled past, putting together his fragmented memories (the shards of a broken mirror) in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way. Or, possibly, the man is a symbol for Soviet Russia itself, though I wouldn't go that far. The problem is that there is no story you could follow, no characters you could identify with, no well-defined spatial or temporal frame of reference for the tediously drawn-out, obscure and disjointed scenes, and due to this lack of basic accessibility there is no message to take home.Mirror is a respectable attempt at a unique form of filmmaking, but it requires such an effort on the viewer's part (with no reward whatsoever) that it is hard to imagine why anyone would not fall asleep or walk out of the theatre after a couple of minutes. If you love films like Derek Jarman's The Last of England, you should certainly give it a try, but for my part, I'll stay with Tarkovsky's Solaris or Andrei Rublev.

When I saw "the mirror" and heard in an interview Nolan claiming that he took as inspirational that film for certain aspects of "Interstellar", I asked myself what the hell was he thinking. The mirror is definitely a really personal movie to Tarkovskij, he even had his own mother do the main character's mother.What is very good in this movie is the cut. Even though the film seems to make no sense at times, actually every scene naturally flows one into other. I heard somewhere that it took a lot of time for Tarkovskij to achieve a cut he liked of the film.Then, the idea of having multiple characters acted by the same actress to get the reflection's concept, the way certain dreams where depicted, the fact that you never actually see the main character, everything just works perfectly for you to like this film nonetheless.

Tarkovskii's Mirror is profoundly episodic in that it consists almost exclusively of dredged up memories, real or imagined, from the life of the central figure, Alexei. The structure is nonlinear, but the viewer never seems to get caught up on the slight confusion created by this. The only aspect that truly hinders understanding is the decision to have Terekhova play not only Alexie's wife but also his mother; one is always a little unsure of which time sequence the film is in. This uncertainty can only be intentional as it enhances the overall theme of the fallibility of human memory. The viewer, however, is oftentimes too distracted by Tarkovskii's beautiful sequences to mind having to untangle the nonlinear plot. The camera follows characters like an unseen eye, although occasionally veers off to focus on a seemingly-unrelated poetic image, like a vase that slowly falls off the edge of a table. The color cinematography saturates the world in a dreamlike palette, such as the early scene in which Alexei's mother sits on a fence in the Moscow countryside. When Tarkovskii switches abruptly to sepia and black and white tones, it's hardly noticeable, and is remarkably well done. Surrealist elements are interspersed, such as the scene in which Maria washes her hair as plaster falls all around her and water floods the house. These instances, combined with the occasional poem narrations, make the disjointed remembrances even more dreamlike. At the end of the film, it is still unclear what exactly the viewer has seen, and another viewing is necessary. The memorable scenes stick in one's head just as much as casual pans of the camera. Tarkovskii's Mirror is full of something, and it's just not clear yet what that something is.