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On his next film, Solaris, Tarkovsky adapted the science fiction classic by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, who was furious with Tarkovsky's changes which focused more on family and nature than on outer space and scientific knowledge. In addition, the relationship between Kris and Hari in the film, where love is the only saving grace, is practically the opposite of that in the book, where it is another hook upon which Lem hangs his philosophy.

In an interview on the film, Tarkovsky said, "It seems to me that the conflict, and the fraught, urgent search for a spiritual ideal, will continue until humanity has freed itself sufficiently to concern itself only with the spiritual. As soon as that happens a new stage will begin in the development of the human soul, when man will be directed into his inner being as intensely, deeply, passionately, limitlessly, as he had directed his efforts up till now to his search for inner freedom."

When screened at Cannes it was called the Soviet response to Kubrick's 2001, yet the two films are, well, worlds apart. Tarkovsky found Kubrick's world "cold and soulless" and intentionally made his film as different as he could, especially eschewing those obligatory science fiction shots of the space ships and gadgetry.

The film's cult following is so strong even today that, when Steven Soderbergh announced a remake, he had to clarify that he was not remaking Tarkovsky's Solaris, but Lem's.

Mirror, perhaps Tarkovsky's most autobiographical film, combines Russian history with personal reflection on Tarkovsky's childhood, especially regarding the figure of his mother. "The purpose of Mirror," Tarkovsky said in a talk, "is that of a homily: look, learn, use the life shown here as an example."

He increased the ambiguity of his stories with this film, and started to require more of the audience. The film met with such resistance from Soviet authorities that Tarkovsky toyed with the idea of giving up directing altogether, but letters from fans kept him going. He quotes one that reads, "My childhood was like that … only how did you know about it?"

"I believe that it is always through spiritual crisis that healing occurs," Tarkovsky wrote. "A spiritual crisis is an attempt to find oneself, to acquire new faith… . It seems to me that the individual today stands at a crossroad, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the existence of a blind consumer, subject to the implacable march of new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, to turn to God."

Stalker represents the fruition of Tarkovsky's stated desire to make a film following Aristotle's concept of the dramatic unities, wherein the singular action of a play takes place in a specific place during the course of one day. The Stalker leads a Writer and a Professor into a place called The Zone where dreams and fantasies reportedly come true. The film includes a prayer by the main character for those he leads to find faith, and a dream sequence where a woman's voice reads from Revelation 6 as we view the debris of a destroyed city. Tarkovsky once told an interviewer, "The Stalker needs to find people who believe in something in a world that no longer believes in anything."

"The film," Tarkovsky wrote in his diary, "is about the existence of God in man, and about the death of spirituality as a result of our possessing false knowledge.

In Nostalghia, Tarkovsky's most ambiguous film, the main character Gorchakov walks through the ruins of a monastery as St. Catherine's voice asks God why he doesn't make himself known. God says that he does, but that Gorchakov simply doesn't see him. This is the most dreamy of Tarkovsky's films, and doubling occurs frequently.

The director, who told an interviewer that this film is about "the nostalgia of spirituality," defined nostalgia in a peculiarly Russian way: "It's identifying oneself with the suffering of another man, in a passionate way." In fact, the idea is so central to Tarkovsky's work that the premiere website devoted to the director is at the domain nostalghia.com.

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