Conducted every 10 years, the Sight & Sound Best Movies of All Time poll is voted on by film critics, writers, professors and other experts in the field of cinema. A concurrent poll is open only to directors, and their results often vary wildly from the main poll. The Cosford Cinema will be showcasing ten selections from the filmmakers’ list every Sunday over the summer from June 4-August 13.

COME AND SEE  (1985) | DIRECTOR: Elem Klimov | WITH: Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mirinova, Liubomiras Laucevicius, Vladas Bagdonas. |  RUNNING TIME: 2H 22M | UNRATED Contains depictions of bloody war violence, strong adult themes | 4K DCP PROJECTION

This legendary film from Soviet director Elem Klimov, which ranked 41st in the directors’ poll, is a senses-shattering plunge into the dehumanizing horrors of war. As Nazi forces encroach on his small village in what is now known as Belarus, teenage Flyora (Alexei Kravchenko, in a searing depiction of anguish) eagerly joins the Soviet resistance.

Rather than the adventure and glory he envisioned, what he finds is a waking nightmare of unimaginable carnage and cruelty—rendered with a feverish, otherworldly intensity by Klimov’s subjective camera work and expressionistic sound design. Nearly blocked from being made by Soviet censors, who took seven years to approve its script, Come and See is perhaps the most visceral, impossible-to-forget antiwar film ever made.

““Come and See,” Elem Klimov’s 1985 masterpiece of hallucinatory realism, was originally conceived under the title “Kill Hitler,” and with good reason. Unsparing in its vision of the atrocities committed by Nazi forces in the Soviet republic of Byelorussia (now Belarus), and climaxing with its own indescribable Führer-murdering fantasy, it remains one of the greatest of war films and one of the most unshakably damning.

"The actual title, no less direct in its charge to the viewer, hails from the Book of Revelation: As the first four seals of God’s judgment are opened, one of the four living beasts declares, “Come and see.” The words beckon you with a chill; they’re like an invitation to the end of the world.

“It’s an invitation you should accept. If you do, know that what awaits you is more than just another meticulously choreographed spectacle of war. This soul-scarring movie unfolds as though under a trancelike spell of its own making, one that disorients as much as it hypnotizes.

"What do we see in “Come and See,” and through whose eyes are we seeing it? The silent, off-screen deity invoked by the allusion to Revelation? Or perhaps Klimov and his cowriter, Ales Adamovich, who both drew on their memories of the Nazi invasion as young men?

““Come and See” is a paradox: a visceral freefall into barbarism, but also a controlled, sometimes contemplative descent. It doesn’t flinch from its own horrors, but it’s still sufficiently restrained, even distanced, for you to process them. And it builds, inexorably, to a conflagration that tests your limits and those of the medium itself, of what depths of suffering can and cannot be dramatized.

Klimov draws out the tension, the anticipatory dread, to an unendurable degree. Perhaps the most ghastly thing is that at a certain point, you find yourself longing for release, for the terrible relief that only the finality of death can bring.” — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Tickets are $5 and available at link above. UM students use code UMSTUDENT at checkout (must show Cane Card for admittance