There Will Be No Leave Today
1959 ‘Segodnya uvolneniya ne budet’ Directed by Андрей Тарковский, Aleksandr Gordon
Synopsis
Soldiers undertake the perilous task of removing a stockpile of World War II bombshells discovered during roadworks under the ground of a small village.
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Master of suspense
At such a young age.
Now that's out the way… -
I'll give this some credit for creating some truly tense scenes, but the characters are so blandly underdeveloped that it's hard to care once that tension is resolved. If you want to see a movie with the same kind of tension that really works, just watch The Wages of Fear. Frankly, it just isn't distinctive, which is something I've never been able to say about a Tarkovsky film before today. I'd no more blame it on Tarkovsky than I would The Seafarers on Kubrick or Boxcar Bertha on Scorsese, but it's still just forgettable propaganda.
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Andrei Tarkovsky's second student short film with Aleksandr Gordon is a truly engaging and suspenseful film about a group of soldiers trying to save a town by pulling bombs from the ground before they could explode.