Film critic J. Hoberman noted that Andrei Tarkovsky's stark (and largely fabricated) biography of Russia's greatest medieval painter, Andrei Rublev, "is a portrait of an artist in which no one lifts a brush." Director Tarkovsky follows his protagonist elliptically, tracking his interactions across a battered and alien landscape of squalid villages, public torture, marauding Tartars, and a church still in the grips of its pagan roots. Rublev is a grand production, even though snow and fog appear far more than lavish set pieces or ornate costumes — but like one of Rublev's unadorned icons, Tarkovsky transubstantiates these base materials into something mystical.