As much as I admire the craft and ambition, I've yet to see a Tarkovsky film I can fully embrace. In my opinion, they are all marred by his lack of faith in pure image; the need for verbal clarification and rhetorical explanation of things take away the mystery of his aesthetics.
I had the opportunity to watch Stalker in a theater once and all I kept thinking by the end was how much I wanted the characters to shut up so I could actually enjoy the mise en scene...