I try not to go on about how much I love the movie Stalker. It sounds kind of pretentious–people think it’s an “art film”–and I can’t really articulate why I like it. The only time I saw it in the cinema, the couple behind me summed it up as “two hours of walking to a place that everyone decides they didn’t want to go in the first place.” I can’t disagree with that. But it’s still one of my favourite movies, and countless creative people have named it amongst their greatest influences.

You can now enjoy it for free online, along with Andrei Tarkovsky’s other films (Solaris is also great; pretty different from the George Clooney version.) Links to the YouTube versions can be found on the Open Culture blog.

UPDATE: You can also grab an eBook of Roadside Picnic, the novel on which Stalker was loosely based, from the Roadside Picnic Wikipedia Page. The Stalker games, which draw on the movie for setting, also frequently go on sale on Steam.

Bonus points: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the authors of Roadside Picnic, got caught up in a bit of publicity when the similarities between their Noon universe novels and Avatar were brought to light.