praise, tempered with criticism of some parts of the film." Goskino did not allow it to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The managing director of the festival, Maurice Bessy, was sympathetic to Tarkovsky. Upon hearing that Mirror would not be allowed to be shown in Cannes, he unsuccessfully threatened not to take any other Soviet film. Mirror has an approval rating of 100% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 23 reviews, and an average rating of 9.1/10. Mirror is frequently listed among the greatest films of all time. In a 2012 Sight & Sound directors' poll, Mirror ranked as the ninth greatest film of all time. In a parallel poll by film critics, the film ranks 19th. Filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia included the film in his personal top ten (for The Sight & Sound Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time poll), writing: "Mirror offers epic hypnotherapy and some of the most beautiful celluloid ever shot." For the same poll, Will Self argued that it remains "the most beautiful film ever made". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it "a startling piece of film-making" and many of its images "transcendentally brilliant". In the British Film Institute, the film is billed as "a work of cumulative, rhythmic effect" and its unconventional narrative is credited with having "pioneered a poetic and richly allusive form." Director Michael Haneke voted for Mirror in the 2002 Sight & Sound directors' poll (where the film ranked 16th) and later said that he has seen it at least 25 times. In the 2002 Critics poll it ranked 35th. In 2018 the film ranked 20th on the BBC's list of the 100 greatest foreign-language films, as voted on by 209 film critics from 43 countries. Interpretation While highly acclaimed, Mirror continues to be viewed as enigmatic. Natasha Synessios wrote that it is closer in structure to a musical piece than a narrative film, noting that Tarkovsky "always maintained that he used the laws of music as the film's organisational principle...emphasis placed not on the logic, but the form, of the flow of events." Critic Antti Alanen called the film a "space odyssey into the interior of the psyche" and Tarkovsky's In Search of Lost Time. Howard Hampton argued that the work's central subject is "the inescapable persistence of the past." Notes References Bibliography External links The Mirror at official Mosfilm site with English subtitles Poems