The Tree of Life *****

Writer/Director: Terrence Malick

Year: 2011

Cinematographer: Emmanuel Lubezki

If you're not already familiar with the work of Terrence Malick, I would suggest you prepare before watching this film. Read the book of Job, and then when you sit down in front of this film, don't expect a narrative retelling of the book of Job, but rather a poetic and personal adaptation... Malick riffs on the ideas present in the book of Job, not by telling a similar story, but by conveying a poetry of images that conjure the mood, and allows the audience to breathe the spellbinding, misty fog of dreams and memories of people who have lived a human experience.

This film is epic. It zooms out to the universe and then in to the microscopic underpinnings of life before focusing in on a family in the 50's in Waco, Texas, presumably remembered and dreamed by Malick himself. A family tragedy is explained purely through context. The tragedy itself is not included nor is it explained. But the emotional impact of that tragedy is meditated upon. We hear the players question God in their prayers, but whereas in the book of Job God finally answered in word, Malick delivers a vision... God's response in images, putting life into context, showing its true minuteness, and its miracle. Life is a delicate balance between the brutal forces of nature and the light of grace. Life is a paradox. Life is mysterious. Life is God's to give and God's to take away... or more importantly, God's to understand. Our role is simply to be in awe of it, to try to find our place in it and be thankful for it though we can not comprehend its boundaries.

This is what I think Malick is meditating on. He communicates not narratively but more like a classical composer. He does not sing the lyrics of his emotions, he builds the mood that will cause you to feel what he feels.

That is why this is a masterpiece of cinema.

The New World ****

Writer/Director: Terrence Malick

Year: 2005

Cinematographer: Emmanuel Lubezki

Malick's dream of John Smith's awesome experience discovering "the new world" and Pocahontas' awesome experience discovering what to her was a new world, though we call it the old world. Time, plot, explanation for events all get lost in Malick's dream. It builds upon his work in The Thin Red Line, which was nearly as confusing for those trying to follow a series of events, and focused more on a kind of journal reading of different characters meditations on war, but here, while keeping John Smith, Pocahontas and John Rolfe's emotional journals, the plot is even more lost. It feels other worldly, like the dreams they must have felt they were living.

If you want to see a historic recreation of events, don't look to a Malick film... if you want to feel what they felt emotionally, if you want to see what the new world must have looked like to their eyes, then this is a beautiful film, that almost seems like the dreams of the memories of the central characters perhaps being recalled at the end of their lives.

The Thin Red Line *****

Director: Terrence Malick

Year: 1998

Book by: James Jones

Adapted by: Terrence Malick

Cinematographer: John Toll

A meditation on life, love and war, set in WWII during the Pacific battle for Guadalcanal.

Tremendously beautiful, masterfully directed, great cast. I love the way his camera isn't so focused on telling a narrative plot line, but more on letting the camera meditate on the idea of "something has gone wrong in paradise". The contrast between the paradise of the island and the hell of war is the central meditation here, and the ruminations of the soldier's inner dialogues is haunting.

Another masterpiece for Malick.