Few actors have managed to portray with facial expressions the true horror and fear which war induces as effectively as Aleksei Kravchenko - and at the time of filming, the 14-year-old who plays the central character Floya who is caught up in the war when partisan fighters arrive at his village and take him away to fight the German army. Come and See is a truly stunning slice of cinema which marries the perspective on war from the perspective of someone who isn't yet an adult with the delirious violence of Coppola's Apocalypse Now while throwing in a finale which stuns with its inventive use of imagery, conveying the unfurling of history and the inevitability of the destructive forces of war under fascism. Director Elem Klimov is a director of bravura talent deftly wielding every cinematic trick in the book to evoke the epic tragedy of the genocide of the people of Belorussia. Klimov rested on his creative laurels after completing Come and See, declaring once that he lost interest in making films and that "everything that was possible I felt I had already done." With Come and See, it's hard to imagine a more powerful condemnation of the effects of war on the human soul ever being made. It is essential cinema, one which movie fans of all stripes should experience before they die.
