The Cranes Are Flying (1957) Review: The Good, The Bad & How to Watch

The Cranes Are Flying (1957) Review: The Good, The Bad & How to Watch 

Soviet Film, War, Drama
Russian title: Letyat zhuravli

Cannes Film Festival, 1958- Winner: Palme d'Or
Berlin Film Festival, 2018- Official Selection
Karlovy Vary Film Festival, 2018- Official Selection 

Cinema has a funny way of capturing the weight of history not through the thunder of battlefields, but through the quiet heartbreak of a single goodbye. Mikhail Kalatozov's 1957 Soviet masterpiece, The Cranes Are Flying, remains one of the most staggering emotional experiences ever committed to celluloid. Long before Hollywood figured out how to portray the home front of World War Two with psychological depth, Soviet cinema delivered a film that pulses with raw, frantic life, capturing the exact moment a nation's youth was swallowed by tragedy. More on Wikipedia or Mubi 

The Cranes Are Flying: A Masterpiece of War and Human Grace 

Set in Moscow just as the Second World War shatters an idyllic romance, the film introduces us to Boris and Veronika. They are young, deeply in love, and intoxicated by the simple joys of youth—running through the misty streets at dawn, watching the cranes migrate across the sky. But history has other plans. Boris volunteers for the front lines, leaving behind a world that is about to change forever. What follows is not a grand political propaganda piece, but an intimate, devastating portrait of grief, survival, and the moral compromises forced upon ordinary people caught in the machinery of war.

Director Kalatozov and visionary cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky approached the screen like painters who had just discovered adrenaline. The camera does not merely observe; it dances, swoops, and races. In the film's most famous sequence, as Veronika runs desperately through the chaos of a Moscow train station trying to catch one last glimpse of Boris, the camera captures her panic with breathtaking fluidity. Urusevsky famously strapped the camera to his body, strapping himself to a circular wooden ring, creating a dizzying, subjective whirl that places the audience right inside Veronika's shattering heart. Every shadow, every shaft of sunlight cutting through ruined buildings, feels heavy with meaning.

At the center of it all is Tatiana Samoilova as Veronika. Her performance is a masterclass in emotional transparency. With eyes that seem to hold entire oceans of sorrow and confusion, she portrays a woman stripped of her anchor. She is neither saint nor villain; she is simply a human being trying to endure an unimaginable nightmare. When the world around her collapses into rubble and loss, Samoilova makes us feel every agonizing second of her internal exile.

Winning the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, The Cranes Are Flying shocked international audiences who had previously stereotyped Soviet cinema as rigid or didactic. Instead, they found a film bursting with cinematic poetry, a deeply empathetic look at the psychological toll of war that transcends its historical era. Decades later, it continues to remind us that while battlefields claim lives, it is the quiet spaces back home where the true cost of conflict is measured, echoing softly every time the cranes fly overhead.

The Good 

On the positive side, the film's visual language is nothing short of revolutionary. Director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky broke free from the conventional, static framing of their era, turning the camera into a living, breathing participant in the story. The frantic tracking shots, the inventive use of natural light, and the swirling, dizzying choreography of the crowd scenes give the movie an electric, modern pulse that still takes your breath away decades later. Coupled with this is Tatiana Samoilova's unforgettable lead performance. Instead of playing a standard cinematic archetype of a wartime heroine, she brings a fierce, vulnerable, and deeply human complexity to Veronika, making her struggles with grief and survival feel achingly intimate. Furthermore, the film deserves immense credit for subverting traditional war movie tropes. Rather than focusing on grand tactical victories or heroic charges, it looks directly at the psychological wreckage left behind in the hearts of those waiting at home.

The Bad 

On the flip side, the narrative demands a great deal of emotional endurance from the audience, which some viewers might find overwhelming or exhausting. The relentless intensity of Veronika's suffering means there is very little comedic relief or narrative breathing room once the war tears her life apart. Additionally, certain plot developments—particularly the desperate choices forced upon Veronika as she navigates isolation and pressure in a bombed-out Moscow—move at a melodramatic pace that can occasionally feel heightened even for a tragedy. Some modern audiences might also find the heavy symbolism of the final sequences a bit overt, as the recurring motif of the migrating birds is woven so thickly into the thematic fabric that it leaves very little to interpretation.
English subtitles