Ranking All Of Director Alexander Sokurov’s Movies
“What are Alexander Sokurov’s Best Movies?” We looked at all of Sokurov’s directed filmography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!
We took all of the movies directed by Alexander Sokurov and looked at their Rotten Tomato Critic, Rotten Tomato User, IMDB, and Letterboxd scores, ranking them against one another to see which movies came out on top. The movies are ranked in our list below based on which movies have the highest overall score between all 6 review sites in comparison with all of the other movies by the same director. The process is all very scientific with no flaws at all.
The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page.
Happy Viewing!
The Top Film’s Of Alexander Sokurov
42 ) The Earthliest of Concerns
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 42
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
A documentary film about the agricultural development in the region of Gorky: the everyday life in a sovkhoz, the building of a reservoir and of a greenhouse.
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41 ) An Example of Intonation
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 41
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
The second film by Sokurov featuring Boris Yeltsin as the principal character. Now he is the President of Russia, invested with power, bearing the full responsibility for the destinies of his distant compatriots as well as his closest kin and friends.
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39 ) Soviet Elegy
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 40
- Letterboxd User Score: 25
We don’t have an overview translated in English. Help us expand our database by adding one.
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39 ) The Degraded
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 39
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
Alexander Sokurov’s first film at ‘Lenfilm’
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38 ) The Diary of St. Petersburg: Mozart. Requiem
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 37
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
Sokurov directed and filmed Mozart’s Requiem for the Rossica Choir in the wonderful hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic.
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37 ) Reading Book of Blockade
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 36
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
Amateur actors read stories from a book describing the 900-day siege of Leningrad during World War II.
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36 ) Empire
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 35
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
A rich woman accidently comes across a conversation on the phone about people talking about a murder.
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35 ) Petersburg Elegy
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 34
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
Petersburg Elegy consists of two parts: the story about the life of Shaliapin’s family, and an emotional generalization of the life of people in modern Leningrad. In all senses this film widens our knowledge of the private life of our great compatriot and follows the first film of the “Elegies” series.
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34 ) Sonata for Hitler
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 38
- Letterboxd User Score: 21
As with so many early films by Sokurov, this film has two dates: the first is the date of its creation (the film was then banned), the second is the date of the final edition and legal public screening. The film consists of German and Soviet archive footage of the World War II — to be exact, from the end of the war. An attempt to make a large–scale documentary on this subject had been undertaken in the Soviet cinema of the 1960s: the film — “Ordinary Fascism” — by the outstanding Soviet film–maker Mikhail Romm had become a classic retrospective investigation of fascism. But Sokurov uses the expressive power of the documentary image in an absolutely different way. He does not amass materials for a large–scale picture of Nazi crimes.
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32 ) Elegy
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 28
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
The reburial of great Russian singer Feodor Chaliapin from Les Batignolles cemetery in Paris to Novo–Devitchye cemetery in Moscow. The daughters from Chaliapin’s second marriage travel to the Soviet Union for the ceremony.
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32 ) We Need Happiness
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 28
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
We don’t have an overview translated in English. Help us expand our database by adding one.
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31 ) Dolce
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 25
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
A documentary portrait of Miho Shimao, widow of renowned Japanese writer Toshio Shimao.
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30 ) Francofonia
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 5
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 16
- IMDB User Review Score: 33
- Letterboxd User Score: 21
Master filmmaker Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) transforms a portrait of the world-renowned museum into a magisterial, centuries-spanning reflection on the relation between art, culture and power.
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29 ) Elegy From Russia
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 22
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
These images and sounds are poetic metaphors that transform “Elegy from Russia” into a document that provides a emotional–historical “memory bank” for all.
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28 ) Save and Protect
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 25
- Letterboxd User Score: 21
Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The universality of the theme of eternal struggle between the soul and the flesh is conveyed through the absence of specific reference to time or place: although the film seems to begin in 1840, its surreal mode effortlessly accommodates an automobile and the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” on an off-screen radio. Focusing on passion from a woman’s perspective and downplaying plot, Sokurov explores his subject in exquisite detail, capturing not only the heat of passion but also the quiet moments before and after and the innocent sensuousness of the body.
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27 ) And Nothing More
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 18
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
Documentary film
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26 ) Faust
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 7
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 15
- IMDB User Review Score: 31
- Letterboxd User Score: 13
Faust is a 2011 Russian film directed by Alexander Sokurov. Set in the 19th century, it is a free interpretation of the Faust legend and its literary adaptations by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann. The dialogue is in German. The film won the Golden Lion at the 68th Venice International Film Festival.
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25 ) The Knot
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 14
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn is a two-part Russian television documentary by Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The documentary shot in Solzhenitsyn’s home shows his everyday life and covers his reflections on Russian history and literature.
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23 ) Mournful Unconcern
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 25
- Letterboxd User Score: 13
The action in this lavishly produced film takes place at an oddly ark-shaped mansion during World War I, and in spirit (although not in story) it reflects the play which inspired it, the ferociously antiwar Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw. A large group of family and friends have gathered at this country house to dance, drink, and converse. Their conversation, in particular, is adorned with erudite literary references and quotations. Despite their apparent refinement, their preoccupations are simple: sex and violence. Disquieting images break the tranquility of the vacationers’ inappropriate idyll: some of these include documentary footage of starving African children, images (both real and re-enacted) of George Bernard Shaw going about his daily life, and a corpse coming to life on an autopsy table, only to cheapen that miracle by scolding a group of women. The music used in the film ironically points to its disturbing message and is uniformly anachronistic.
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23 ) Father and Son
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 6
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 13
- IMDB User Review Score: 31
- Letterboxd User Score: 13
A small family “a father and a son” lives on the top floor of an old house. The father retired from the military, when he was a student in flight school, he experienced the first and the only love of his life. This girl became his wife and she gave birth to his son. Both of them were twenty years old then. The wife died when she was young. This love remained his secret unique happiness. The son grew up, and he will probably be a military man like his father. The son’s features constantly remind the father of his wife. He doesn’t separate his son from his still persisting love: this is his unity with his beloved woman. The father cannot imagine his life without his son. The son loves his father devotedly and deeply, a filial feeling intensified by an instinctive moral responsibility that is being tested by life. Their love is almost of mythological virtue and scale. It cannot happen in real life. This is a fairy–tale collision.
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22 ) Moloch
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 12
- IMDB User Review Score: 28
- Letterboxd User Score: 13
In 1942, in Bavaria, Eva Braun is alone, when Adolf Hitler arrives with Dr. Josef Goebbels and his wife Magda Goebbels and Martin Bormann to spend a couple of days without talking politics.
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20 ) Leningrad Retrospective
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 8
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
A montage of Leningrad newsreel becomes a composite collage made up of documents-shots, divided in 16 parts, presenting the author’s point of view on Russia and modern times. In the title, Sokurov appears as ‘compiler’ and the selection of the documents is just like an artistic process.
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20 ) The Evening Sacrifice
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 8
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
The manifestation and fireworks on the 1st of May, one of the ritual celebrations of Soviet times, as a gathering of tired participants of a mass scene falling into pieces without the director’s orders and without any aims.
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19 ) Alexandra
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 4
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 10
- IMDB User Review Score: 22
- Letterboxd User Score: 21
An elderly woman takes a train trip to visit her grandson at his army camp inside Chechnya.
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18 ) Elegy of Life
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 8
- IMDB User Review Score: 14
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
A documentary about the famous musician Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya.
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17 ) A Humble Life
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 18
- Letterboxd User Score: 11
A Humble Life is certainly true to its title, a documentary study of the day-to-day world of Umeno Mathuyoshi, an old woman who lives in an isolated mountain house in the Nara prefecture in Japan.
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16 ) Confession
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 2
- Letterboxd User Score: 26
Originally aired on Russian television, this five-part semi-documentary series tells the story of a Russian naval commander in charge of an Arctic-based ship. The film provokes a meditation on solitude and isolation, while revealing the daily duties associated with the ship. Voice-over narration by the commander, other sailors, and even a third-person voice provide the “confession” of the title.
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15 ) Moscow Elegy
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 14
- Letterboxd User Score: 13
A 1988 documentary film directed by Alexander Sokurov, about the later life and death of Soviet Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The film was originally intended to mark the 50th birthday of Tarkovsky in 1982, which would have been before his death. Controversy with Soviet authorities about the film’s style and content led to significant delays in the production.
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14 ) Mariya
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 8
- Letterboxd User Score: 13
“Maria” is a film requiem for a Russian peasant woman, Maria Semionovna Voinova. The film is in two chapters. The first chapter consists of an impression of Maria Semionovna, scenes of the colours of summer time: hay–making, bathing in a river, work in the flax fields and a holiday in the Crimea. The second chapter, set nine years later, is in black and white and deals with how Maria Semionovna’s life ended. The mood is one of a sad and elegiac narration.
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13 ) Taurus
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 2
- IMDB User Review Score: 22
- Letterboxd User Score: 13
The film is set inside a russian mansion and begins with morning procedures for one of 1900s most controversial politicians, Lenin.
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12 ) Robert. A Fortunate Life
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 8
- Letterboxd User Score: 11
Aleksander Sokurov brings the treasures of the Hermitage back into the light by making films about artists and their paintings. He has chosen the painter Hubert Robert, who spent a long time in Italy, and whose preference was for creating ancient ruined landscapes and naturalistic portrayals of times past. He was successful with the wealthy, who bought his works from him. The camera pans across the paintings while Sokurov speaks of a happy era, when the artist was at one with the spirit of the times, and agreed with the taste of his clients. Just how far removed from us this is, is shown by pictures of a “Nô” performance which are inter-cut on the screen. No words are necessary to describe what everybody knows today.
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11 ) The Lonely Voice of Man
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 3
- IMDB User Review Score: 14
- Letterboxd User Score: 13
The film is Sokurov’s feature film debut and is based on the novel The River Potudan by Andrei Platonov. It’s a story about the lives of people in the Russian countryside in the beginning of the 20th century. The film was completed in 1979 as a graduation film, but was banned by the Soviet state and didn’t premiere until 1987.
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9 ) Whispering Pages
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 1
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 13
- IMDB User Review Score: 18
- Letterboxd User Score: 4
The pages that whisper through this brooding, beautiful tone poem are from nineteenth-century Russian literature, primarily Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. An anonymous man wanders through decomposing, fog-enshrouded catacombs and encounters a series of “the degraded and the humiliated,” including a holy prostitute and a Kafkaesque bureaucrat. Shot partly in Sokurov’s dreamlike black and white with a dense sound track of eerie, echoing voices and bursts of mournful Mahler.
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9 ) Oriental Elegy
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 5
- Letterboxd User Score: 6
Oriental Elegy (1996). Visually impressionistic, atmospherically dense, and narratively opaque, Oriental Elegy is the surreal journey of a displaced spirit (Aleksandr Sokurov) as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question – “What is happiness?” – an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness.
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8 ) Stone
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 3
- IMDB User Review Score: 18
- Letterboxd User Score: 6
Via the New York Times: “…a severely obscure meditation on pre-revolutionary Russia in the form of an encounter between a ghost from the past and the ghost’s present-day guardian. In fact, the two characters seem to be the shade of Anton Chekhov and the young man who tends a Chekhov museum in the Crimea, though that is never made explicit.”
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7 ) The Second Circle
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 11
- IMDB User Review Score: 8
- Letterboxd User Score: 4
A man tries to come to terms with his father’s death and to deal with the mundane details of his burial in a society cut off from spirituality.
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5 ) Mother and Son
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 17
- IMDB User Review Score: 2
- Letterboxd User Score: 1
A slow and poignant story of love and patience told via a dying mother nursed by her devoted son. The simple narrative is a thread woven among the deeply spiritual images of the countryside and cottage.
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5 ) Days of Eclipse
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 6
- IMDB User Review Score: 8
- Letterboxd User Score: 6
This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov, a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government’s earlier mania for relocating and eliminating whole ethnic groups and classes of people. These desperately unhappy people are unable to find any pleasure in this diverse companionship, but instead are antagonistic to it, and often resort to desperate measures in their doomed attempts to ease their pain.
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4 ) Elegy of a Voyage
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 9
- IMDB User Review Score: 4
- Letterboxd User Score: 1
From a misty night into the dark exposition rooms of a museum to ponder philosophically at paintings by ‘Pieter Jansz Saenredam’ , ‘Hercules Pieterszoon Seghers’ , Hendrikus van de Sande Bakhuyzen, Andreas Schelfhout, Vincent van Gogh, Pieter Bruegel, Charles Henri Joseph Leickert.
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3 ) The Sun
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 2
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 7
- IMDB User Review Score: 5
- Letterboxd User Score: 6
The Sun (Russian: Сóлнце, Solntse) is a 2005 Russian biographical film depicting Japanese Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito) during the final days of World War II. The film is the third drama in director Aleksandr Sokurov’s trilogy, which included Taurus about the Soviet Union’s Vladimir Lenin and Moloch about Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler.
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2 ) Spiritual Voices
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 8
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 1
- IMDB User Review Score: 1
- Letterboxd User Score: 6
In 1994, Alexander Sokurov accompanied Russian troops assigned to a frontier military post at the Tajikistan/Afghanistan border to film their experiences. While unnamed tribal forces occasionally engaged the troops in skirmishes, Sokurov’s haunting documentary chronicles the downtime between activity.
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1 ) Russian Ark
Review Website Ranks:
- Rotten Tomatoes Critic: 3
- Rotten Tomatoes Users: 3
- IMDB User Review Score: 5
- Letterboxd User Score: 1
A French marquis wanders through a vast labyrinth of corridors, theaters and ballrooms at a reception for a Persian ambassador.
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Alexander Sokurov’s Best Movies
Alexander Sokurov Review Website Filmography Rankings
| Film | RT Critic | RT User | IMDB | Letterboxd | Overal Rank |
| Russian Ark | 3 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 |
| Spiritual Voices | 8 | 1 | 1 | 6 | 2 |
| The Sun | 2 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 3 |
| Elegy of a Voyage | 8 | 9 | 4 | 1 | 4 |
| Mother and Son | 8 | 17 | 2 | 1 | 5 |
| Days of Eclipse | 8 | 6 | 8 | 6 | 5 |
| The Second Circle | 8 | 11 | 8 | 4 | 7 |
| Stone | 8 | 3 | 18 | 6 | 8 |
| Whispering Pages | 1 | 13 | 18 | 4 | 9 |
| Oriental Elegy | 8 | 17 | 5 | 6 | 9 |
| The Lonely Voice of Man | 8 | 3 | 14 | 13 | 11 |
| Robert. A Fortunate Life | 8 | 17 | 8 | 11 | 12 |
| Taurus | 8 | 2 | 22 | 13 | 13 |
| Mariya | 8 | 17 | 8 | 13 | 14 |
| Moscow Elegy | 8 | 17 | 14 | 13 | 15 |
| Confession | 8 | 17 | 2 | 26 | 16 |
| A Humble Life | 8 | 17 | 18 | 11 | 17 |
| Elegy of Life | 8 | 8 | 14 | 26 | 18 |
| Alexandra | 4 | 10 | 22 | 21 | 19 |
| Leningrad Retrospective | 8 | 17 | 8 | 26 | 20 |
| The Evening Sacrifice | 8 | 17 | 8 | 26 | 20 |
| Moloch | 8 | 12 | 28 | 13 | 22 |
| Mournful Unconcern | 8 | 17 | 25 | 13 | 23 |
| Father and Son | 6 | 13 | 31 | 13 | 23 |
| The Knot | 8 | 17 | 14 | 26 | 25 |
| Faust | 7 | 15 | 31 | 13 | 26 |
| And Nothing More | 8 | 17 | 18 | 26 | 27 |
| Save and Protect | 8 | 17 | 25 | 21 | 28 |
| Elegy From Russia | 8 | 17 | 22 | 26 | 29 |
| Francofonia | 5 | 16 | 33 | 21 | 30 |
| Dolce | 8 | 17 | 25 | 26 | 31 |
| Elegy | 8 | 17 | 28 | 26 | 32 |
| We Need Happiness | 8 | 17 | 28 | 26 | 32 |
| Sonata for Hitler | 8 | 17 | 38 | 21 | 34 |
| Petersburg Elegy | 8 | 17 | 34 | 26 | 35 |
| Empire | 8 | 17 | 35 | 26 | 36 |
| Reading Book of Blockade | 8 | 17 | 36 | 26 | 37 |
| The Diary of St. Petersburg: Mozart. Requiem | 8 | 17 | 37 | 26 | 38 |
| Soviet Elegy | 8 | 17 | 40 | 25 | 39 |
| The Degraded | 8 | 17 | 39 | 26 | 39 |
| An Example of Intonation | 8 | 17 | 41 | 26 | 41 |
| The Earthliest of Concerns | 8 | 17 | 42 | 26 | 42 |
