72%User score 72 percent
King Rat
1965 · Drama · War
User Score
846 votes
In WW2, twelve year old Soviet orphan Ivan Bondarev works for the Soviet army as a scout behind the German lines and strikes a friendship with three sympathetic Soviet officers.
Recommendations based on this film
CRCulver
September 1, 2018
<i>Ivan’s Childhood</i>, released in 1962, was Soviet director's Andrei Tarkovsky first feature film. An adaptation of a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov set in World War II, its protagonist is a 12-year-old orphan (Nikolai Burlyaev) on the Eastern Front whose small size allows him to scout German positions undetected. Ivan's missions have been useful to the army, but officers Lt. Col. Gryaznov (Nikolai Grinko)…
Read the full review on TMDBbadelf
July 14, 2026
Summary: 10/10: A masterpiece of visual poetry and historical witness that invented the aesthetic grammar Tarkovsky would refine for the rest of his career, and an uncompromising portrait of childhood destroyed by fascist violence that has lost none of its power to devastate. Ivan's Childhood is a dreamy film about a brutal subject. The twelve-year-old Ivan, orphaned and consumed by rage, works as a scout for the Sov…
Read the full review on TMDBReviews are written by the TMDB community, not by Ivan's Childhood's publisher.
