Made in Sweden in Tarkovsky’s final year (he died after the film’s completion of cancer at age 54), The Sacrifice is a measured, compassionate view of humanity at the edge of apocalypse. In a remote house in the north, a family gathers and soon learns of an impending, terrible war. Photographed by Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist in ethereal northern light, and opening and closing with two of cinema’s most breathtaking single-take sequence shots, The Sacrifice is a masterful, elegant, elegiac film of great formal rigour and intensity. Tarkovsky supervised its editing from his hospital bed; he died in December 1986. Profoundly pessimistic and yet profoundly hopeful, The Sacrifice is a staggering achievement.