content: There are films that seem bad at first but open up when seen a second or third time. This is not one of them. The first two times I saw this film, it seemed incredibly beautiful to me. My jaw probably fell open the first time I saw it. But the third time was too much. The film is so incredibly silly and pretentious I almost felt like laughing at some of the scenes. At times it almost seems like a Saturday-Night-Live parody of an art film, e.g. the scene of the monks noisily chomping on pomegranites. A talent for visual composition and an interesting sound track are just not enough to make a good film. Paradjanov had one idea in this film ("Hey, I'll tell a story with a series of ikons!") and repeated it five hundred times. Even imagistically, there are many many far more impressive films than this one -- take Orson Welles' "Othello" as one underrated example. Among art films, there are A films, B films, and then there is this film.