It's always exciting to discover new lost media, but if I have to give a hot take I'll say it's overrated due to the hype right now, and people will reappraise it a bit more calmly once the furor's died down.

It's clearly the work of a filmmaker still finding his feet, trying to figure out his sensibilities and straining against financial limitations put on him by the production budget.

Like, yeah, the scene with the church windows is cool, and you can interpret them as thematic if you want to, but honestly, to me it's clear that the pyrotechnics just weren't calibrated correctly and it went off way too big. And after the damage it did to the masonry there's no way to reset the shot (afaik the priest refused reshoots?), so they just had to go with bad footage. Yes, they edited around it okay, but it's the kind of sloppy workaround that Scorsese's better movies simply do not struggle with.

Also, De Niro is obviously giving a strong performance, but while it may have been interesting in the 70s, through a modern lens I just don't vibe as much with these tortured explorations of unmoored masculinity struggling to come to terms with a changing world, and I think people are too willing to interpret the relationship with Andrey through a romantic lens. It reads to me more like a criticism of the presumed emotional deadness of the Other behind the Iron Curtain in a way that honestly feels a bit dehumanizing.

Anyway, I don't wanna yuk anyone's yum, it's a great movie, it just didn't connect with me the way it has with others.