SEND IN THE CLONES Natalya Bondarchuk has an out-of-body moment in Solaris.

A famous anecdote about Russia’s late master Andrei Tarkovsky concerns his love for a certain action movie. “The brutality and low acting skills are unfortunate,” the legendary snob told an interviewer about James Cameron’s The Terminator. “But as a vision of the future and the relation between man and his destiny, the film is pushing the frontier of cinema as an art.” (No mention if Tarkovsky then gave the thumbs-up sign and delivered his best “Ah’ll be baack.”)

So if you’re thinking the summer dumb season might not seem like the right moment for some Soviet-era seriousness, there’s a closer connection than you realize. One thing is certain: “Revisiting Tarkovsky,” a valuable retrospective of the director’s seven major features, including 1972’s epic Solaris and a 2008 documentary about his career, is the perfect moment to acquaint oneself with his visions—occasionally grandiose, often profound, always beautiful.

Tarkovsky, the son of a poet, had artiness in his bones. By the time of his first feature, the 1962 drama Ivan’s Childhood (about an orphan’s survival during WWII), the 30-year-old Muscovite was already pushing toward an interior psychology. Forests and birch trees—haunted by ghosts in Russian myth—figure prominently as 12-year-old Ivan ingratiates himself among harder men. The movie might remind today’s viewers of the young Christian Bale’s hellish journey in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. It stunned critics worldwide and set Tarkovsky on an ambitious path.

His subsequent epics—the medieval Andrei Rublev (1966), set on a smoky 15th-century steppe, and the heady space psychodramas Solaris and Stalker (1979)—are movies that require a big screen and a hushed crowd to work. (Beautifully denatured cinematography and long stretches of natural sound simply can’t breathe in your living room.) There is a strongly religious strand of faith in Tarkovsky’s material as his characters, often scientists or skeptics, bump up against images of a higher truth. Solaris, often called the “Russian 2001,” ends up on a planet that can think, while the dank, neurotic Stalker is set in a mysterious realm, the Zone, that can grant a person’s private wishes.

This is serious filmmaking, of a pace that will test modern attention spans. But the rewards are hard to overstate: a fluidity of emotion and memory that feels like the creation of a diaristic art form. Tarkovsky’s more intimate dramas attract the hottest critical support: 1975’s Proustian mortality drama The Mirror; the lovely Nostalgia (1983); and his final film, The Sacrifice, a 1986 cry against nuclear holocaust. At these 35mm screenings, you will almost certainly see expat Russians reconnecting with a bold talent. (Tarkovsky, for all his international prestige, frequently ran afoul of censors.) The greater irony would be this director’s obsolescence in an age of availability and flat-screen comforts. We need art and cyborgs both—on that point, Tarkovsky would agree.