For Sokurov, the relationship between a father and a son surpasses physical, even human intimacy -- its something approaching the sacred.
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The New York Times by Dana Stevens
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.
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
Like most of Sokurov's movies, this oblique parable is mysterious, elliptical, irresistible.
Irritatingly devoid of irony, the film has an unintentional but unmistakable homoerotic subtext.
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.
Hypnotic film.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
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.
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
Sokurov's new companion piece (to "Mother and Son"), has the tedium without the trance.
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.
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.