Stalker was one of my big epiphany films when I was first getting into film properly. I've retained, as clear as when I watched it first, so many of the film's images. Of the men travelling into the zone along the railway lines, watchful all eyes on the horizon; of the preternaturally green grass they cross little-by-little, throwing pebbles forward and collecting them; of the water splashing around the ruined tessellated floor of the derelict building near the centre of the Zone; the water again, the Stalker resting, a wolf standing alert; the dune-like waves of sand inside a factory building.

I'm wary of actually ever re-watching it, for fear that my memories of it will be dispelled. I know that Tarkovsky has a predilection for sententiousness, as was never more clear in Solaris (which to my mind is a disappointing film and one of T's weakest). But Stalker seemed just right to me. His last film, The Sacrifice, is another film with similar protean mystical-religious themes allied to a grandeur of imagery (though again some of the dialogue is again overly pretentious, and the roles for women are, well, a by-product of his times I suppose, if you're being generous).