Whenever I sit down to watch a wildly praised foreign (i.e.-not from the U.S.) film from the past I always ask myself as I'm watching: If this same exact movie were made in modern-day Hollywood with the exact same script (but in English, of course) and the exact same direction, would those same critics and foreign-film buffs still praise it? And in this case, the answer is obviously a resounding Hell No! (And thus it clearly exposes the irrational bias that many "serious" film fans don't even realize they have.) For if Stalker came out of a present-day Hollywood studio, these same people would rightfully dismiss this dull, pretentious waste of film that stretches a flimsy 15-minute's worth of plot into 2+ excruciatingly boring hours, and fills it with uninsightful, masturbatory psychobabble for dialogue. But because it's in Russian and it's from the 70's, and, oh yeah, it's a metaphor for... something (whatever...yawn), it's a "masterpiece". Lame.