If the Time-Life publishers commissioned a picture book on the Great American Bread Basket, ca. World War I, they'd probably want it to look like this -- a thing you could be proud to place on your coffee table. You never know for sure what the picturesque Thomas Hart Benton …
Once upon a time, there lived in a valley above the clouds a young Austrian couple, secure in their beliefs that fascism would never reach them. The fact-based story of a conscientious objector who refused to fight alongside the Nazis — villagers turn against the #NeverHitler for not returning their …
At one point in Terrence Malick’s heady huffing of the sour stink of success, his protagonist (a skull-faced Christian Bale) muses, “So much love inside us that never gets out.” So many words, too — like nearly every line of any importance here, the observation remains unspoken. It’s probably for …
Early on in director, co-writer, and star Dev Patel’s madcap mashup of a movie, his protagonist Kid sets out to buy a gun. “You like John Wick?” asks the salesman. “This is the same gun he had, except made in China.” You know: a cheap knockoff. A cleverly self-conscious pre-emptive …
Two-and-a-quarter-hour history lesson, trimmed down from two and a half after its initial release, on John Smith and Pocahontas, and the latter's marriage to another, John Rolfe, and her intended sojourn in England which became instead her eternal rest. Terrence Malick's account is not a love story, or not just …
The Coen brothers, in their second movie, have taken great personal strides. No longer trying to walk the thin line between pastiche and parody that so held them back in Blood Simple, veering off instead into the woolliest wilds of their combined imaginations, they — director and co-writer Joel and …
Twenty years separate Terrence Malick's third and fourth film and up until then, the man could do no wrong. The tortoise now moves at a hare's pace. Since 2011, Malick has doubled his career output. Will this, his eighth film break the curse or are we to expect more of …
Terrence Malick's adaptation of James Jones's WWII novel also marks his return to the director's chair after a vacation of twenty years: too heavy a weight for any movie, or moviemaker, to carry. One of the problems with Malick's earlier works -- the crutch of voice-over narration -- is here …
Director Terrence Malick turns his camera on the transcendent character of love - an admittedly difficult trick. Love isn't as easy to catch on film as, say, lovers (Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko). But Malick has an eye for turning external landscapes into signposts of the interior life: the island …
In only his fifth film in 38 years, eye-of-God director Terrence Malick wraps the pains of a family in ’50s Texas (partly based on his youth) in a bloated burrito of suffocating pomposity. The “wow” nature visuals, cosmic perspective, and solemn, whispery spirituality destroy any chance for real, poetic profundity. …
It's not hard to figure out why the promotional campaign trumpets "from Executive Producer Terrence Malick" for writer-director Julio Quintana's story of a ruined seaside village where all the women started wearing black (and stopped getting pregnant) after a wave claimed several dozen schoolchildren. (Well, all the women except one: …
Terrence Malick takes another shot at the history-of-the-universe-tied-to-man's-existential-condition thing he did in Tree of Life.