Nostalghia is Andrei Tarkovsky's brooding late masterpiece, a darkly poetic vision of exile. It was the first of his features to be made outside of Russia, the home to which he would never return. Tarkovsky explained that in Russian the word "nostalghia" conveys "the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away." This debilitating form of homesickness is embodied in the film by Andrei (Oleg Yankovsky, The Mirror), a Russian...

A portrait of the Russian poet details the passions that informed her poetry, the banning of her work before and after World War II, her three marriages, her anti-Stalinist beliefs, and her friendship with Shostakovich and Pasternak.