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Bones and All poster
By now “Bones and All”—the title refers to the consumption of an entire body, down to the last morsel (a rare occurrence)—has turned into a picaresque, a road movie punctuated by horrendous moments that, in terms of blood and gore, go far beyond the killings of a film like “Badlands,” in which sparks of romance have begun to sprout between two unusual young people, both sympathetic and dangerous.
One Guys Opinion • One Guy's Opinion • Dec 1, 2022
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What ensues plays clear tribute to Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” the two traveling across the country through golden-hour vistas, but the film is far more tender toward its leads, shooting everything from a tentative first kiss in a slaughterhouse to a swim in a Kentucky lake with a childlike sense of wonder.
Leila Latif • IndieWire • Sep 2, 2022
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That’s what we get with the Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s equal parts elegant and grotesque road-trip saga “Bones and All,” which has a “Badlands” meets “Near Dark” vibe and contains a couple of genuinely effective shock moments, but ultimately comes across as a gratuitously violent and at times overwrought Young Adult drama dressed up with art-house accessories.
Richard Roeper, chicago.suntimes.com, richard-roeper • Chicago Sun-Times • Nov 21, 2022
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But when he lingers, as in a sequence set at a remote Nebraska gas station that reminded me as much of the Starkweather sequence from Matthew Barney as it did Springsteen's Nebraska and Malick's Badlands , it's rapture.
Bill Chambers • Film Freak Central • Sep 6, 2022
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As love blossoms along the open road, their relationship evokes the Bonnie and Clyde -esque abstractions of Badlands, in its innocent deadliness.
Isaac Feldberg • Inverse • Oct 8, 2022
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It makes sense that one of the inspirations was the outlaw lovers of Badlands .
David Rooney • The Hollywood Reporter • Sep 2, 2022
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2001: A Space Odyssey poster
Advance whispers comparing The Tree of Life to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey prove to be entirely apt.
Toronto Star
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Of course, the birth-of-the-universe scenes evoke the chilly grandeur of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
MovieHabit
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In scenes reminiscent of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," Malick sets a soaring soundtrack to swirling images of the cosmos, the formation of the solar system, the cooling of the earth, the genesis of life from the primordial ooze and the development of nature throughout the eons, complete with dinosaurs.
He inserts spaced-out planet-hopping and trippy asides that strongly resemble Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Gaspar Noe's more recent "Enter the Void."
At least in that regard, the film's comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey — which Malick courts throughout — could wind up having merit.
In an elaborate special effects sequence that draws obvious and valid comparisons to Kubrick´s "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Douglas Trumbull provided visual effects for both films, working here along with Dan Glass of "Matrix Reloaded"), nebulae expand, galaxies race away from each other, the Earth forms, volcanoes erupt, the planet cools to a point where multi-cellular life emerges, thrives, and then almost be wiped out by a meteor strike.
George Washington poster
The film is a lyrical look at the lives of a group of children from Winston-Salem, a poverty-stricken North Carolina backwater and comes across as a sort of ‘Terrence Malick shoots Gummo’ – indeed, Green freely admits the influence of Malick, in particular the photography of Days of Heaven.
ViewLondon
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The most apt comparison I’ve seen is to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, a beautifully photographed, quiet portrait of a time and a place.
MovieHabit
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Though other 1970s influences are also apparent—the 1969 short “A Day With The Boys,” directed by character actor Clu Gulager, also included on the disc, is a key source for the film’s kids-at-play vibe—George Washington suggests what Malick’s Days Of Heaven would have been like if it just followed the girl and never left the city.
Scott Tobias • The Dissolve
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Many critics have compared the film's style to films like "Days of Heaven" by Terrence Malick.
The Lariat
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Candace Evanofski's molasses-toned voiceover narration reminds us of the mournfully matter-of-fact cadences of Linda Manz's voiceover in Days of Heaven, a movie with which George Washington is often compared.
The Austin Chronicle
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Nearly every review of George Washington so far has compared the film as a cross between Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997) and Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), both great films that use mood and style over story and character as George Washington does.
Combustible Celluloid
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Dreamland poster
The film contains echoes of Malick’s debut feature, Badlands , starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as two young people in love and on the run, and his dreamlike second film, Days of Heaven , starring Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as another set of young lovers trying to find a way out of trouble while working as farm laborers in the Texas panhandle.
Lee Jutton • Film Inquiry • Nov 17, 2020
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These words are spoken by Eugene’s kid sister, Phoebe (Lola Kirke performs the older-wiser thoughts of child actor Darby Camp), with a kind of purity that recalls the dreamy voiceover of Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” — as mythic an influence on “Dreamland” as Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” which could have been its prequel, had Clyde died and Bonnie stumbled away wounded from that climactic shootout.
Peter Debruge • Variety • May 13, 2019
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At 27 years old, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte proves himself to be one of the most exciting young directors around with Dreamland, a drama with dazzling visuals, subtle performances and deft nods to classics like Days of Heaven and Bonnie and Clyde .
Caryn James • The Hollywood Reporter • Apr 28, 2019
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Beginning with fatalistic narration (from an unseen Lola Kirke) that immediately locates the film in a long tradition of neo-Western legends, “Dreamland” channels everything from “Days of Heaven” to “Slow West” as it lays the groundwork for a half-remembered folktale about a teenage boy and the outlaw who changed his life.
David Ehrlich • IndieWire • May 3, 2019
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A sensitive, soberly rendered and ultimately flawed film about growing up in the parched plains of the Texas Panhandle, Dreamland is an uneasy mix of Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven and Badlands, with a pinch of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, starring the always probing, often underrated Margot Robbie as a bank-robbing vigilante.
Rex Reed, observer.com, rex-reed • The New York Observer • Nov 12, 2020
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Right from the start, it's obvious that screenwriter Nicolaas Zwart and director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s are positioning their film as a tribute to the early works of filmmaker Terrence Malick, especially “Days of Heaven,” which shares with it such elements as a Depression-era setting, lovers on the run following a crime (which Malick also utilized in “Badlands”), narration from the main character’s younger sister (voiced by Lola Kirke) and plenty of scenes clearly shot during the so-called “golden hour” to lend a sense a grandeur to the otherwise bleak surroundings.
Peter Sobczynski • RogerEbert.com • Nov 13, 2020
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True Romance poster
And while those and other more obvious inspirations such as Bonnie and Clyde and Terrence Malick’s Badlands (of which actually borrows its score) are noticeable, it still packs enough verve and gusto to create something entirely fresh and influential in its own right.
Ricky D • Goomba Stomp • Jul 18, 2019
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Scott was doing it on purpose, and he comes right out and tells us he's doing it on purpose in the second scene, which finds Patricia Arquette reciting voiceover narration in an airy, storybook register, while Hans Zimmer's score taps out a melody that can be best described as "the closest that you can get to the Orff music used in Badlands without actually running into copyright issues".
An enchanting score by an uncharacteristically restrained Hans Zimmer (paying vigorous homage to the music from Badlands) further alludes to that intoxicating feeling of blossoming love.
CineVue • Cine-Vue • Nov 19, 2015
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Maybe if Michael Tronick and Christian Wagner did anything with the editing, or if Hans Zimmer’s music was any good (though he does rip off the Badlands theme to some success), but the film’s a technical yawn.
The Stop Button • Feb 23, 2016
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Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette are the Badlands -style lovers who head to California with a stash of stolen cocaine, but the show is stolen by Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken, whose “vendetta kinda mood” head-to-head became one of the most memorable sparrings of 1990s cinema.
Mark Kermode, www.theguardian.com • The Guardian • Nov 22, 2015
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When Detroit comic-store assistant Clarence (Slater) and novice whore Alabama (Arquette) meet, not only do they immediately fall in love, but the tone of her voice-over lets us know that we're in for a Badlands-style rerun.
Time Out
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Sightseers poster
The story here is something like "Badlands" set in the Midlands, as a repressed, awkward woman who lives with her domineering mother embarks on a caravan trip with her new boyfriend.
Marc Mohan, IFC Films, www.facebook.com • The Oregonian/OregonLive • Feb 21, 2013
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"Sightseers" is part travelogue and part killing spree, and Tina and Chris rightfully take their place with other murderous couples on the run, from Annie and Barton in "Gun Crazy" (1950) to Kit and Holly in " Badlands " (1973) to Mickey and Mallory in " Natural Born Killers " (1994).
RogerEbert.com
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From They Live By Night and Gun Crazy to Bonnie & Clyde and Badlands to Natural Born Killers and Thelma & Louise, the doomed-couple road movie has a longstanding tradition in cinema.
Derek Smith https:, www.tinymixtapes.com, derek+smith • Tiny Mix Tapes
tinymixtapes.com ↗
Basically, think Natural Born Killers, Badlands, and Bonnie and Clyde, only rather than the perpetrators being lovers-on-the-run, robbers fighting the system, or just pure psychopaths killing for the hell of it, Tina and Chris are instead just average schlubs, only killing because it makes their holiday that much more convenient.
Movie Mezzanine • May 7, 2013
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While its offbeat quirkiness and plethora of specific cultural and geographical references make it likely to play best to UK audiences, with careful handling this raucously enjoyable hybrid of two very different 1970s classics - Terence Malick's ever-influential Badlands and Mike Leigh's teleplay Nuts In May - might also spawn a cult international following as a surefire midnight-movie option for festivals, and on DVD/VOD.
Neil Young • The Hollywood Reporter • May 25, 2012
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The deliciously dark Englishness of the film – Nuts In May meets Badlands comes pretty close to summing it up – and the sheer oddness of its lead characters will naturally make Sightseers something of an acquired taste, but it is filmed with such visual panache and sense of humour that cult status should be guaranteed.
Mark Adams, chief film critic, Ben Dalton, Ellie Calnan, Rebecca Leffler, Sandy George, Jeremy Kay, Geoffrey Macnab, Michael Rosser, Louise Tutt • Screen Daily • May 23, 2012
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The Revenant poster
Themes of rapacious greed, western entitlement and cultural intolerance coupled with environmental disregard flow with subtle might, but at the heart of Iñárritu’s woodland tempest looms Glass’ superhuman perseverance, driven by the memory of those he loved and incarnated in the same dreamy sylvan echoes that Terrence Malick brushed so artfully into “The New World.”
Tom Meek • Cambridge Day • Jan 6, 2016
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The sinuous long takes are an Emmanuel Lubezki specialty, and can’t help but evoke the cinematographer’s work on The New World , an appropriate reference point, perhaps, but also one whose deep, ineffable strangeness on a shot-to-shot level exposes the conventionality of Iñárritu’s aesthetics.
Reverse Shot
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The film opens in a way that reminded me so much of Terrence Malick’s "The New World,” which was also shot by “The Revenant’ cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and that alone made me fearful that we’re in for more of the same.
weekendwarriorblog • Tumblr • Dec 7, 2015
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The film is directed by Alejandro Iñárritu in a Terrence Malick (“The New World”) vein, with shots of the sky through the trees, silhouettes against the setting sun and omniscient overviews of the entire landscape.
But Lubezki’s work is less reminiscent of Birdman than his Terrence Malick collaborations The New World and The Tree of Life, full of gorgeous waking dream imagery and haunting shots of raging fires in a nighttime snowstorm or a bell ringing atop a decimated church.
Jason Bailey • Flavorwire • Dec 22, 2015
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Many have said the same about Terrence Malick's dreamy visions of a lost America, especially "The New World."
Apocalypse Now poster
One can see some subtle borrowings from such war classics as Apocalypse Now and Platoon, but nothing so blatant as to be construed as copying those films' styles.
Filmquips Online
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The obvious reference point is 1979's Apocalypse Now, which shares The Thin Red Line's distended narrative style as well as Malick's penchant for lustrous images emerging from an ink-black cinema screen.
For another like it you have to go all the way back to Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) or even Malick's last movie Days of Heaven (1978).
Combustible Celluloid
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Unlike Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now , which screamed out against the horrors of war by depicting its participants as maniacs and its situations as surreally haunting, The Thin Red Line evokes equal (if not greater) horror by operating in such irregular, fitful rhythms, by juxtaposing the brutal with the banal, and by depriving both soldier and viewer of any sturdy foundation against which to measure their experience.
Nick’s Flick Picks
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About as blatantly antiwar as they come, this film has much more in common with the disillusionment-filled "Platoon" (Oliver Stone) and "Apocalypse Now" (Francis Ford Coppola) than Steven Spielberg's equally disturbing, but strongly patriotic "Saving Private Ryan."
Where "Apocalypse Now" and "Platoon" were both one man's viewpoint on the Vietnam war and "Saving Private Ryan" was the story of a handful of men searching for one, "The Thin Red Line" is a film of every man and his quest to keep the people around him alive.
Train Dreams poster
In many ways, Train Dreams feels like a cinematic cousin to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven or Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow.
Doug Jamieson • The Jam Report • Sep 10, 2025
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If you’ve seen “Days of Heaven” (1978), then you’ve already watched a vastly superior version of this movie.
Barry Wurst • Hollywood in Toto • Dec 18, 2025
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“Days of Heaven” comes to mind, although (and obviously so) “Train Dreams” does not reach the poetic beauty of such.
Hector Gonzalez, Mark Ziobro, Paul Emmanuel Enicola, Matt DeCristo, Montearo Brown, Vidal Dcosta • The Movie Buff • Feb 17, 2025
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Comparisons to the likes of Terrence Malick or Chloé Zhao are hard to escape, especially with its dreamy existential yearning, quasi-divine spirit and juxtaposition of human and nature.
John Nugent • Empire • Nov 26, 2025
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Compared to the likes of The Tree of Life and The New World, the narrative here is more linear, the voiceover is more explanatory, the characters are more readable, and the Christian resonance is far more slight (if evident at all).
josh • LarsenOnFilm • Nov 22, 2025
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There are also visuals suggesting aspects of “Badlands” (1973), “The New World” (2005) and “The Tree of Life” (2011), all films by Terrence Malick.
Barry Wurst • Hollywood in Toto • Dec 18, 2025
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I Believe in Unicorns poster
Like Seimetz's debut, "Unicorns" reminds that the current generation of working filmmakers continues to draw inspiration from Terrence Malick's "Badlands."
Ryan Lattanzio • IndieWire • May 29, 2015
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"Unicorns" reminds that the current generation of working filmmakers, like Seimetz, continues to draw inspiration from Terrence Malick's "Badlands."
Ryan Lattanzio • IndieWire • Mar 19, 2014
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There Will Be Blood poster
We're variously reminded of Greed, Citizen Kane, Days of Heaven, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and even Werner Herzog's oil-fire documentary, Lessons of Darkness — all better movies on similar themes.
East Bay Express • Jan 2, 2008
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The production design is by Jack Fisk, and "There Will Be Blood" often recalls Fisk's work with Terrence Malick on the equally meditative yet operatic "Days of Heaven."
Ann Hornaday • The Washington Post • Jan 3, 2008
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Young Mary Sunday might have walked right out of Days of Heaven , and like that film, Blood ’s centerpiece sequence features a glorious, terrifying conflagration.
Looking Closer • Jan 22, 2026
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Surely the most offbeat adaptation of an American novel in the decade since Terrence Malick treated James Jones's The Thin Red Line as a transcendentalist manifesto, There Will Be Blood is taken from Upton Sinclair's panoramic 1927 novel Oil! (Actually, it's a riff that draws on Oil!'s first few chapters.)
The Power of the Dog poster
The time and place are superbly evoked in Grant Major’s production design, dominated by a cattle ranch homestead reminiscent of the Sam Shepard character’s in Days of Heaven , only darker and more oppressively Gothic with its heavy oak interiors, surrounded by grassy plains and backed by mountains.
David Rooney • The Hollywood Reporter • Sep 2, 2021
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On its face, the haunting Western concerns Phil and George, radically disparate brothers living on a ranch that aesthetically feels indebted to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven , and the ways Rose comes between them.
Robert Daniels • Polygon • Dec 1, 2021
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Reaching back to a Hollywood tradition built on films like “East of Eden,” and also to Terrence Malick’s rural art-house parable “Days of Heaven,” Campion, who wrote the script (based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel), centers the tale on two adult brothers who have spent enough of their lives intertwined to know just how different they are.
Owen Gleiberman • Variety • Sep 2, 2021
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Ari Wegner’s work is immaculate, filming the country similar to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven , where the world can look gorgeous in a variety of lights, but within the text is the complexity of people.
Leo Brady • Nov 18, 2021
amovieguy.com ↗
One thing is certain, that The Power Of The Dog is the most gorgeous-looking Western set in the early 20th century since Days Of Heaven 43 years ago.
Todd McCarthy • Deadline Hollywood • Sep 2, 2021
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La Dolce Vita poster
When not occupied with agents or equally tormented family members like his brother (Wes Bentley) or his father ( Brian Dennehy ), Rick spends his time living the lush life to an extent actual screenwriters rarely do, going to "La Dolce Vita"-type Hollywood parties and cavorting with platoons of all-too-willing female accomplices.
Los Angeles Times Film Critic • Los Angeles Times • Mar 4, 2016
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We can safely infer that Bale’s character (identified as “Rick” in the closing credits) is meant to be a latter-day stand-in for that knight, a Hollywood type who has embraced la dolce vita and lost his sense of self in the process.
Justin Chang • Variety • Feb 8, 2015
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Despair abounds in stylish duds, no doubt, and parallels to chic sixties cinema are obvious, but it’s a far cry from the disaffected existentialism of L’Eclisse or La Dolce Vita.
Jaymes Durante, fourthreefilm.com, jaymes-durante • FOUR:THREE • Nov 16, 2015
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(If there’s a model here, it’s Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, particularly in some star-packed party scenes set on the grounds of Antonio Banderas’ happily hedonistic character.)
Jessica Toomer, Josh Kurp, Steven Hyden, Reyna Cervantes, Derrick Rossignol, Philip Cosores, Jason Tabrys, UPROXX Entertainment • Uproxx • Oct 18, 2024
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Undertow poster
His films remind me of " Days of Heaven ," by Terrence Malick (one of this film's producers), in the way they are told as memories, as if all of this happened and is over with and cannot be changed; you watch a Green film not to see what will happen, but to see what did happen.
Roger Ebert • RogerEbert.com • Oct 21, 2004
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Over the course of his own three films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line) Malick has steadily moved away from ordinary plot mechanics and into pure poetry.
Combustible Celluloid
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Not since Terrence Mallick (Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line) has an American director conjured a sense of place, and time, with such atmospheric magic.
Malick has also made three films -- all masterworks -- that have moved in the opposite direction: from heavy plot ("Badlands") to mixed ("Days of Heaven") to very little plot ("The Thin Red Line").
SplicedWire
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Over the course of his own three films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line) Malick has steadily moved away from ordinary plot mechanics and into pure poetry.
Combustible Celluloid
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This story of two brothers (Jamie Bell and Devon Alan) whose dreary, mud-slathered, peptic-ulcer–blighted existence in the swampy south is shattered by the arrival of a nasty uncle (Josh Lucas) seeking a stash of gold plays rather like The Night of the Hunter, by way of Badlands, by way of Macon County Line.
Premiere
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La Notte poster
Many images evoke the Cinema of Stylish Ennui: think of Michelangelo Antonioni's "La Notte" and "L'Eclisse," Michael Mann's "Heat," Sofia Coppola's " Somewhere ."
RogerEbert.com
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In The Hermit, Rick wanders the grounds of a lavish shindig at the Malibu mansion of a Spanish satyr (Antonio Banderas), a set piece that manages to simultaneously recall Antonioni’s La notte (1961) and—in old horndog Banderas’s statement that “women are like flavors: sometimes you want raspberry, and then you get tired of it and you want strawberry”—Raekwon’s “Ice Cream.”
Reverse Shot
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Like the superior "Knight of Cups," this is a warmer cousin of the cosmic-minded bourgeois dramas that Michelangelo Antonioni ("La Notte") used to make 50 years ago.
RogerEbert.com
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In short, Malick has fashioned his own version of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Eros is sick” trilogy of L’avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’eclisse (1962).
Michael Joshua Rowin • BKLYNER • Mar 17, 2017
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Dunkirk poster
No war film you’ve seen before – from Das Boot to Saving Private Ryan to The Thin Red Line – comes close to what Nolan has created here.
James Mottram • South China Morning Post • Jul 18, 2017
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Like a more restless cousin of Terrence Malick , who infused the combat picture with Transcendental philosophy in " The Thin Red Line ," or Robert Altman , who painted microcosmic panoramas of civilization in such films as " Nashville " and " Short Cuts ," "Dunkirk" treats every English soldier on that beach and in assorted nearby planes and boats as part of a collective organism, less interesting for their biographical details than for the roles they play in the drama of history, however large or small they may be.
RogerEbert.com
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A phenomenal score by Hans Zimmer (the renowned composer for The Thin Red Line, Gladiator and Interstellar) creates a prodigious wall of sound made up of ticking clocks, heartbeats and engine noise that enhances the tension of the countdown.
Jonathan, Text: Cameron Williams • The Neighbourhood Paper • Jul 19, 2017
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In terms of storytelling, Nolan’s impressionistic approach places “Dunkirk” close to Malick’s “The Thin Red Line”: It’s not about dialogue, specific characters or story arcs as much as it is about a gut level feeling, which Nolan delivers as a full body sensory explosion.
Adam Graham, The Detroit News, Adam Graham • The Detroit News • Jul 19, 2017
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By comparison, “The Thin Red Line” and “The English Patient” seem like lumbering soap operas.
Matthew Rozsa • Salon • Jul 21, 2017
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Some reviews see parallels to Terrence Malick and The Thin Red Line, but Nolan seems just as influenced by macro-scale documentaries like John Ford’s The Battle of Midway and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro.
Alan Zilberman • Washington City Paper • Jul 19, 2017
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Meek's Cutoff poster
Though one could glimpse The Searchers (1956) in its lunar landscapes, or Days of Heaven (1978) in its detached mood and often eerie beauty, the film's small, inward-looking narrative and headily large themes make it a piece of considerable originality.
The British Film Institute • British Film Institute
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Meek’s Cutoff is most definitely a niche programmer – sparse and understated dialogue, the barest of mood music and a bleached, dusty palette brings to mind such revered but commercially-barren westerns as Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Robert Benton’s Bad Company (1972) and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).
Notwithstanding exquisite images that evoke Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven," city-slicker audiences may find themselves getting saddle sore.
Epic in scope, and featuring a powerful lead performance by Williams, Reichardt does justice to the myth of the wagon train settlers and makes a Western every bit as beautiful and poetic as Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, and thankfully a bit more energetic.
He captures the vast wilderness in condensed form and has a "Days of Heaven" kind of appreciation for the golden hues of the landscape.
Clint O'Connor, The Plain Dealer, Clint O'Connor, The Plain Dealer, Oscilloscope Laboratories • cleveland.com • May 19, 2011
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Hell or High Water poster
He works in references to other films, Westerns and neo-Westerns, that deal with similar issues — “Badlands,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” the Coens’ “True Grit” (which also featured Bridges), any number of old Westerns about Jesse and Frank James , and maybe even “No Country for Old Men.”
Channeling the open-plains lyricism of Terrence Malick’s 1973 masterpiece Badlands and its modern spiritual offspring, Andrew Dominik’s 2007 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (not to mention David Lowery’s even more recent Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water concerns two brothers on a bank-robbing spree through West Texas, and the just-shy-of-retirement ranger intent on catching them.
Nick Schager • The Daily Beast • Aug 11, 2016
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“Two-Lane Blacktop,” “Vanishing Point,” “Badlands.”
Ty Burr • The Boston Globe • Aug 10, 2016
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Directed by David Mackenzie, from a screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, the movie is a tragic comedy -- or comic tragedy -- with a gorgeous, painterly look to rival Terrence Malick's great "Days of Heaven."
Joanna Connors, The Plain Dealer, Joanna Connors, www.facebook.com, joanna.connors • cleveland.com • Aug 19, 2016
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Beasts of the Southern Wild poster
I don’t really buy that a tiny girl would talk like Hushpuppy, who narrates “Beasts of the Southern Wild” with a plainspoken lyricism that recalls “Days of Heaven,” but the movie is a fable, the narration is beautiful and Wallis makes it sing.
Chris Hewitt • Twin Cities Pioneer Press • Jul 11, 2012
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Comparisons to Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and David Gordon Green’s “George Washington” are inevitable and appropriate, as Zeitlin emulates those movies’ sense of reverie and poetry and their ability to find aesthetic beauty in the natural, mundane world.
Eric D. Snider • Eric D. Snider • Jun 27, 2012
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Reminds me of The Band - Music from the Big Pink - its on another level, there's magic realism, bits of Mallick's "Days of Heaven", post apocalyptic fantasy and everything what Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things are" should have been.
Benh Zeitlin‘s feature directorial debut feels like one that will be cherished by kids for decades to come, and lead Hushpuppy – played by six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis – might be remembered as iconic a child protagonist as To Kill a Mockingbird ‘s Scout, Days of Heaven ‘s Linda, and Where the Wild Things Are ‘s Max (the three pictures it shares the most in common with).
You can, perhaps, already guess the film’s influences: movies such as George Washington , Days of Heaven and Ballast, yes, but also real-world events such as Katrina, the BP oil spill and even melting polar ice caps (we see glimpses of strange, prehistoric creatures arising from the softening ice and trampling their way toward the Bathtub).
Larsen on Film • Jun 2, 2017
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Report: It’s difficult to explain exactly what Beasts Of The Southern Wild is, though it’s undoubtedly something extraordinary: like a live-action Miyazaki film, with Days Of Heaven narration, set in a dirt-poor community at an unspecified time of crisis.
Katie Rife, Jacob Oller, Jesse Hassenger, Casey Epstein-Gross, A.V. Club Staff, William Hughes, Grant Sharples, Matt Schimkowitz, Paste Staff • The A.V. Club • Apr 19, 2022
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A Ghost Story poster
Yes, Lowery’s residential Texan locale superficially echoes scenes from The Tree of Life , but beyond this vague pictorial similarity there’s no comparison.
WordPress.com • Jul 30, 2018
wordpress.com ↗
As with Lowery’s first pairing of Affleck and Mara, 2013’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints , a Texan crime romance with echoes of Badlands , the comparisons with Malick are apt again here: in the spirit of The Tree Of Life , A Ghost Story is both deeply intimate and vast in scope, bridging years, then centuries, before looping back on itself.
Phil de Semlyen • Empire • Aug 1, 2017
empireonline.com ↗
This a movie that will remind you of the best, most thought-provoking moments of Interstellar , The Time Machine , A.I. and The Tree of Life .
Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011) is the closest comparison film in terms of tone, mood and narrative construction to this picture, and that is an eccentric compliment.
Jason Carney • Phoenix Film Festival • Jul 21, 2017
phoenixfilmfestival.com ↗
When Lowery resorts to aping the spacey visuals of Terrence Malick’s similarly laborious “The Tree Of Life,” “A Ghost Story” is still a pleasure to look at.
(Call it a sapling sprouting from the soil around The Tree Of Life .)