Malick’s case is incredibly strong for a relatively modern auteur. He is certainly having a puzzling decade by first giving us perhaps his best career work- and then falling on his face with a weaker trilogy (though I must admit I’m very excited to revisit). When I did my top 500 I had Days of Heaven at #47 and The Thing Red Line at #43. They aren’t going anywhere. I like to have a 10 year moratorium on new films before I canonize them and add them to my top 500– but in this case with The Tree off Life– I can’t deny that after two viewings I think it’s his best film. This gives me 3 Malick films in the top 50. Like Lynch, he creates a world of his own and if you put a gun to my head and asked me which director in film history made the most beautiful (I grant the word itself leaves this up to many interpretations) films “Malick” might be the first name to emanate from my lips. I’m open for debating his case against others. Malick is still only ranked 48th on the TSPDT director top 250 but that’s silliness. If you break it down to see where his films rank vs. other films in their respective years- his films on TSPDT, rank as 1st (The Tree of Life, The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven), 2nd (The New World) and, 5th (Badlands) best films. Amazing.
Best film: The Tree of Life. So, by transitive property (using my The Thin Red Line top 500 ranking) I actually have The Tree of Life ahead of anything by the Coen brothers, Spielberg, David Lynch, PT Anderson and all but 3 films from the 1990’s (Breaking the waves, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction). Wow.
total archiveable films: 7
top 100 films: 2 (The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven)
top 500 films: 4 (The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven, The New World, Badlands)
top 100 films of the decade: 5 (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life)
most overrated: Badlands. It is #132 of all-time on TSPDT and Malick’s #1 film. I’m below these two grades a little. It’s his easiest film – and a brilliant one- but clearly not his best. This will remedy itself on TSPDT over time.
most underrated: The New World is all the way down at #807 on TSPDT (I have it at #193) but because it’s more recent it’s not as bad as it looks. It’s actually the #5 film on TSPDT and I have it as #2 so we’re fairly close there actually.
gem I want to spotlight: The Thin Red Line has taken 20 years to be fully appreciated but it’s there now. The #1 film from 1998 on TSPDT. The photography is sublime but how about Hans Zimmer’s scales in the score?
stylistic innovations/traits: There’s really a lot Malick is known for now: voice-over narration, magic hour, stunning photograph usually involving nature. If the director is easily parodied then he/she’s probably an auteur (QT, Wes, Hitchcock, Bergman, Leone). He’s also known as a meticulous editor who takes forever to makes movies (or at least did) as he took a 20 year break between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line (and then another 7 year break and then another 6 year break). Though he didn’t start out this way with his relatively straightforward narrative style in Badlands– I think he has to be known now as an editor/montagists and a manipulator of the standard narrative. His most recent trio of films (To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song) have not been as good—plain and simple. I’m eager to revisit but the knock on them that they are more like perfume advertisements is apt (though they are beautiful). He’s also a Christian and his works have to be studied and viewed as such for their spirituality and Christ allegories (Thin Red Line especially).
top 10
- The Tree of Life
- The Thin Red Line
- Days of Heaven
- The New World
- Badlands
- To the Wonder
- Knight of Cups
By year and grades
| 1973- Badlands | MP |
| 1978- Days of Heaven | MP |
| 1998- Thin Red Line | MP |
| 2005- The New World | MP |
| 2011- The Tree of Life | MP |
| 2012- To the Wonder | R |
| 2015- Knight of Cups | R |
*MP is Masterpiece- top 1-3 quality of the year film
MS is Must-see- top 5-6 quality of the year film
HR is Highly Recommend- top 10 quality of the year film
R is Recommend- outside the top 10 of the year quality film but still in the archives
Where should I start with Terrence Malick?
@Randy… I’d start with Badlands. It’s his first film, one of cinema’s greatest debut films of all-time, and it is his most straight-forward narrative as well.
I can’t think of any reason not to just go chronologically through his work… at least up to Tree of Life. He develops his own filmmaking language through them and you can see him building and expanding upon the visual grammar and syntax from film to film.
Malick is the only director similar to Tarkovsky. If you could make a top 10 of both of their movies combined, what would it be?
For example my top 3 is
1)mirror
2)tree of life
Andrei Rublev
What would your top 10 be?
@Azman— certainly some similarities with Tarkovsky (beautiful films, high ambition, long time between films– except for Malick lately). Certainly Malick has turned into a full-blown montagist like Eisenstein or Oliver Stone in recent years where Tarkovsky had a really high average shot length– i always think of Bela Tarr as a Tarkovsky acolyte.
As for the combined top 10. I think it is:
1. Stalker
2. Nostalgia
3. The Tree of Life
4. The Thin Red Line
5. Days of Heaven
6. Andrei Rublev
7. The Sacrifice
8. The New World
9. Solaris
10. The Mirror
11. Badlands
@ Drake. Badlands is most certainly a MP. You think all Tarkovsky films are MP???
@AP — So no, I mean I have Ivan’s Childhood from Tarkovsky behind Badlands and that would be next on this list. I graded Badlands out as a MP as you can see above- but I’m grading 500+ movies a year and I try to do it the next day after watching it so I don’t fall behind. Sometimes a Must-See will stick with me and I should go back and upgrade it or vice-versa. It’s really close (Tarkovsky and Malick are two of the all-time greatest)– especially with Solaris, The Mirror and Badlands– but yeah I would take these 6 Tarkovsky films about Badlands— and did so here in my top 500 of all-time when I updated my list last April
http://thecinemaarchives.com/2019/04/10/the-best-500-films-of-all-time/
@ Drake. Thanks for the reply. Fair enough. I was fixated on the Tarkovsky page. Also, the stunning realization that everything he created was a MP or near about.
Seems like The New World has fallen behind Badlands. Still have it as a MP or below?
@AP– sorry- good catch on The New World. It hasn’t fallen- I just did this on very little sleep this morning using my top 500 of all-time page and missed it. I corrected it above now. Thanks for the help. Unreal that Badlands isn’t in the combined top 10.
But yes- Tarkovsky is a lot of people’s legitimate choice for the greatest director of all-time and he has a pretty strong case. What a body of work.
i can’t decide if his non badlands (one of my favorite films and simply one of the greatest works of art of the past 100 years) are great films are pretentious garbage. how do you think pretentiousness or self importance should factor into reviews of films. i am not saying he is a bad filmaker, badlands alone makes him great, and he certainly has an eye for visuals, but im not a fan of some of his motifs (hushed voiceover, too much magic hour, cutting out actors, frankly not enough shots to get to see characters truly).
for me id much rather watch fun films like the avengers or inglorious besterds than tree of life any day, even if they aren’t as ‘deep’ or visual.
anyways when i think of malick i think of a wide shot of the sun gleaming down on a famous actor staring at his girlfriend saying, “how did the universe lead me to you?”
also this is my opinion so i dont want to offend anyone who had an emotional experience watching his films. song to song was emotional for me to watch but i don’t know if it is a particularly great movie or not.
@m – It sounds like you’re more a fan of traditional narrative film-making– and not so much of a bolder expression of artistic film style– at least with Malick. Badlands is brilliant– but it is his least “Malick-y” (you name a few of the stylistic traits here talking about his motifs— your complaint about “too much magic hour” makes me scratch my head confused) if that makes sense. Your preference for The Avengers over Tree of Life would back that up.
I hardly ever talk about pretentiousness of self-importance. An auteur or film either works or it doesn’t (and sometimes in-between) but what you would call pretentiousness and self-importance I’d call artistic ambition. I want my directors to have ambition.
One of us is reading ‘ the tree of life’ wrong. For me it is a top 10 of all -time movie. Why do you find it pretentious? Why is the movie not ‘fun’ for you? Surely it is better than the Avengers. There really is no comparison.
For me it is the best movie of its decade beating out fury road, which is an incredible film. Since you disliked tree of life, what would be your top 3 of the 2010s be? Would it include the avengers?
It sounds to me like you’re misusing the word “pretentious”… like a great many people do. Something isn’t pretentious if it is actually too deep or high-minded for your personal taste. Pretension means playing at depth or significance when you really aren’t offering much of either. Malick could potentially be accused of being too esoteric or high-minded or philosophically obsessed, but I don’t think charges of pretentiousness can be credibly laid at his doorstep.
azman
my top 5 of 2010s
1) Inside Llewyn Davis
2)Hateful Eight
3) The Master
4)Mad Max
5)Joker
6)Cloud Atlas
7)Meyerowitz Stories
8) Zootopia
9) Steve Jobs
10)12 years a slave
11)x men days of the future past
12)Ad Astra
13) Roma
14) Hobbit battle of five armies
15)toy story 3
also i wasn’t saying avengers is the best film, just that it is fun, and i enjoy the film. i think it is great, and especially scarlett jo is great in it. and i love superhero films (comic books were my first love before cinema).
sorry i wrote top 5 but got a little carried away those are my 15 favorite. haha
The images you provided here are brilliant. Malick is the man. I agree with your ranking almost entirely, I would only switch Badlands and The New World and probably put A Hidden Life between them. It’s also little surprising that you don’t rate To the Wonder, Knight of Cups (and probably Song to Song) given the criteria you established here. They are very strong visually. I watched all three films multiple times, tried to really focus and at this point I’m ready to call them pretentious. Or I’m simply not capable of recognizing whatever Malick had in mind.
@Chief Keef. I really want you to answer me, or one of the readers of the blog, what is a pretentious movie?
Malick is definitely not pretentious
@ Aldo If the attempt is ambitious (always a plus in my eyes) but falls short in execution. If it works, director is a genius, if it doesn’t he is pretentious. He can’t reach the heights he intended so he pretends in a way. The Tree of Life vs any of the three mentioned films is a good example. Except if you saw something in these films that I didn’t.
@Chief Keef, I agree with you here. In the Tree of Life Malick has one goal in my mind, to tell a story of loss and nature vs grace. He also intertwines the story of creation and a man and his relationship with God to an astonishing effect. All his later work pales in comparison to the Tree of Life(then again, most movies pale in comparison to the Tree of Life).
I don’t know if Malick can really be considered pretentious though. He doesn’t really care how people feel about his films and they don’t come off as someone trying to show people how deep he is. His films are just too genuine I think. He earnestly believes the ideas and emotions that are present in his films.
Do you call for ambition? pretentious?
@Aldo I dont think Malick was pretentious. I’m assuming your comment was addressed to me since it was a reply to mine. Anyways, here is what I think.
Malick’s films are highly ambitious. Attempting to tell the entire universe’s story intertwined with the entire story of a boys life is extremely ambitious. The only other movie with this level of ambition is 2001 a space odyssey but it lacks the intense human feeling that The Tree of Life provides. (Not a critique or praise. They are different movies. The cold style works or 2001 and the ’emotional’ style works for Tree). The Tree of Life is telling the story of creation but it also adds the story of a child, how he deals with the loss of his brother, how he questions God and how he comes to peace with everything. On top of that, it has some brilliant photography and highly ambitious CGI. You go from space, to the dinosaurs, to God and then back to a family in 1950s Texas.all within 2 hours and a quarter-wow…
Pretentious is when a director tries something extremely ambitious but fails because he isn’t talented enough or because of some other reason.
It’s simple really, if you liked the Tree of Life, its a ambitious masterpiece, if not you may think it is pretentious. I certainly do not think so. I believe it’s a highly ambitious masterpiece.