The New World: Critic Reviews

A subtle and context-driven approach to historical filmmaking.

Many have tried, but none can match Malick's touch for shuffling a deck of elegiac images.

In Terrence Malick's elegiac film, Pocahontas is a woman whose story has the reach of myth and the tragic dimension of life.

A profound, revealing, wonderful film about the meeting of two cultures and the shaping of a new one.

The ponderous narrative lacks so much focus that it will likely leave most viewers squirming in their seats.

That sound you're about to hear is the cracking of spines as Terrence Malick enthusiasts like me bend over backward trying to cut The New World a break.

The New World is stately almost to the point of being static and thus has trouble finding a central story around which to arrange itself; it's not quite the thin dead line, but it's close.

Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's Badlands.

As an epic, it's monumentally slight.

Malick is a writer-director of extraordinary vision who is like an endangered species.

Malick is so content to tell the tale through mood that he neglects its meaning.

It's by no means the longest movie ever made, but it's one of the longest movies ever made in which next to nothing ever happens and barely a word is spoken.

The New World is a poetic force at once wrenching and soothing.

The lesson is as clear as rainwater: to the innocent eye, ripe for marvelling, every world is new.

He [ Terrence Malick] is a visionary, and this story requires one.

The film, which is superb on every technical and design level, has both greatness and fuzzy-headedness in it.

Like the best music, this film elicits emotions rather than manipulates them.

Malick appears to consider this an epic tale, but beyond its 2-hour-plus length, the film never quite reaches the scale he's after.

There's a problem when the movie about the European conquest of America seems longer than the actual conquest itself.

The movie is two and a half hours of paralyzing tedium.

Malick's exalted visuals and isolated metaphysical epiphanies are ill-supported by a muddled, lurching narrative, resulting in a sprawling, unfocused account of an epochal historical moment.

This lavish coffee-table-book of a movie gradually reveals itself as an uninvolving, crashing bore.

Malick paints the celluloid like a canvas, filling it with rapturous images of wild America, its flowing fields of grass, rivers teeming with fish and the endless horizon of free land.

He [Malick] swoons for his own well-honed image as a painter of woodland idylls, a man who leaves no sway of wheat or ripple of water unmet by his fatherly gaze.

A Terence Malick film remains an event, but he appears awfully disoriented in The New World -- less a seasoned traveller than a perplexed tourist, content to mask his confusion by reaching for a camera and snapping relentless pretty pictures.