Alexander Sokurov’s reputation as a purveyor of intense, “spiritual” films was sealed by Nick Cave’s article “I Wept and Wept, from Start to Finish,” about the singer’s reaction to Mother and Son. But as this full-scale retrospective—the first in North America—reveals, the Russian master has produced a body of work that is dauntingly prolific in range. Suppressed by the Soviet censors, admired more in France and Japan than at home, and largely unavailable in North America, Sokurov’s films and videos range across histrionic early works banned by the Soviet authorities (The Lonely Voice of Man, Mournful Indifference); hushed, inward portraits of lone souls coping with familial death (The Second Circle, Mother and Son); spectral films based on Russian literature (Dostoevsky in Whispering Pages, Chekhov in Stone); monumental meditations on the military, set in forbidding landscapes (Confession); and a quartet of recent features about the twentieth century’s most powerful leaders (Hitler in Moloch, Lenin in Taurus). Woven throughout his career are the “elegies”: poetic, death-haunted portraits of figures, both real and fictional, who are in some way isolated from the world. Anointed by Andrei Tarkovsky as his spiritual and aesthetic heir, Sokurov has led an embattled and solitary career over the past twenty-five years, creating work that is visionary, romantic, serene and feverish, despairing and exultant.