The Thin Red Line: Critic Reviews

The Thin Red Line is an epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract.

The thinking person's Saving Private Ryan.

Malick hasn't lost his knack for impressive visuals!

A painterly, probing and poetic picture of war.

The Thin Red Line shows us freedom at its most visceral and unintellectual - and cinematic.

Fascinating!

One of the most curious and perversely brilliant films ever made!

Takes war to a stirring level!

Although Malick hasn't made a movie in two decades, he hasn't lost his touch for eye-catching vistas and the poetics of conflict.

A complex, highly talented work marked by intellectual and philosophical ambitions!

It wrestles with complexity, speaks to us in poetry, weaves multiple narrative strands into a tapestry, opens the festering wounds of war and gazes inside without blinking.

A highly original piece of motion picture artistry!

An uncannily timed movie phenomenon!

A haunting, scattered reminiscence piece, where the mind is allowed to drift through its memories, and retrieve impressions of the beautiful and the hideous, the serene and the hysterical, the banal and the profound.

The Thin Red Line's hallucinatory blend of images defines the very essence of cinema.

... one of the richest and lushest films ever to emerge from Hollywood.

The Thin Red Line would have been infinitely more successful without the frequent rest-stops full of mental malaise and philosophical pretense.

It makes you think and ask questions. Its characters contradict themselves, talking one way, acting another. And it ends abruptly, with many things unresolved. Like life.

Won't be a commercial hit, but it will rank at the top of my list of best movies of 1998.

Malick transforms James Jones' two-fisted prose into visual poetry.

...a film of sublime power and beautiful tedium.

The visionary quality of the film and the exotic cinematography of John Toll make this a most impressive and unusual work of art.

Perhaps the movie's final, lasting image embraces all we know: From the mud grows the lotus.

far more interested in juxtaposing the beauty of nature untamed and the harsh destruction of mankind at war than ... telling a story or developing characters

It's a thin (red) line between love and hate