Like most of Sokurov's movies, this oblique parable is mysterious, elliptical, irresistible.

Less a story than a situation, the film contends with a difficult transitional period in the lives of its title characters, who face the growing necessity of getting some distance from each other.

Like a dream within a dream. Its images and emotions are vivid, disquieting and also hermetic, and while it may frustrate your desire for clear storytelling and psychological transparency, it has an intensity that surpasses understanding.

If the setting is claustrophobic, it's also bracingly beautiful, a contradiction that is every bit in keeping with Sokurov's preference for ambiguity over clarity.

Passes by like a dream.

Where a lesser movie from a lesser director might sink into its own ponderousness, Sokurov uses the ambiguity of the father and son's relationship to craft a sort of erotic puzzle.

By the time the final shot arrives -- a rooftop panorama in the falling snow -- we don't know much about any of the people we've just encountered. But we have been treated to a feast for the eyes.

The result can be--sometimes is--tedium; but, whether or not the work succeeds as Sokurov intended, it is an adventurous director's probe of cinema possibilities.

For Sokurov, the relationship between a father and a son surpasses physical, even human intimacy -- it’s something approaching the sacred.

Nothing much happens by way of plot in the course of Father and Son, but it offers a fresh and often startling vision of one of the most fundamental relationships between human beings.

Hypnotic film.

Borders on the risible but, because Sokurov is Sokurov, this exalted, wacky scenario--which uses Lisbon as an imaginary Russian seaport--is amazingly staged, inventively edited, and rich in audio layering, with camera placements that sometimes verge on the Brakhagian.

Sokurov's use of space, religious symbolism and raw emotion compensate for any sense of exclusion.

The film should please his (Sokurov's) fans even while proving a frustrating, tedious experience for most art house audiences.