This is not the recent remake directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney and Natasha McElhone. This is the original Russian version of Solaris (1972 ) which presents a provocative interpretation of the side effects from long term space exploration. The film is set aboard a Russian space station that is orbiting the liquid covered planet named Solaris. Strange happenings have taken place and contact with the crew has been lost. Cosmonaut and psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) departs for the station in order to investigate the reports of strange phenomena sent back by the crew. The minute he boards the desolate space station strange events, both ...  Read the complete review

Solaris 1972 Natalya Bondarchuk .... Hari Donatas Banionis .... Kris Kelvin Jüri Järvet .... Dr. Snout Vladislav Dvorzhetsky .... Burton Nikolai Grinko .... Kelvin's father Anatoli Solonitsyn .... Dr. Sartorius Sos Sarkisyan .... Dr. Guibariane Russian language credits start rolling over the screen accompanied by haunting organ music, Bach's "Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ", setting a strangely lethargic and alien tone for the rest of the movie. First scene: pond weeds billow in flowing water, eventually the camera picks out a slightly dishevelled looking human looking ...  Read the complete review

Let's be very clear before starting - pending some cleaning up by DooYoo there are some reviews for this product that are mis-placed. As you'll see from the product description, this product is the excellent two disc DVD release of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film 'Solaris'. A handful of the product reviews here are for the much later re-make by Steven Soderbergh and starring George Clooney. Don't buy the wrong DVD, because they're very different films! It's a real pleasure to find almost all of Tarkovsky's films on DVD now. Artificial Eye have done a good job of transferring the film to the digital format, and the extras include some startling behind the scenes ...  Read the complete review

When Andrei Tarkovsky initiated the necessary processes to begin the making of Solaris, he held the intention to create a film which could not be placed in any of the genres. However, as Tarkovsky himself admitted, Solaris is very much a science fiction film. Starring Donatas Banionis (the DVD has a featurette of his career), the film chronicles a cosmonaut who arrives at a space station over the ocean filled planet Solaris to attend to the mysteries which the crew have witnessed, namely hallucinations. Dr. Kelvin (Banionis) then becomes a victim of these odd occurences himself when he sees his dead wife several times on the station. Famed for Tarkovsky's long ...  Read the complete review