Terrence Malick, Ranked

assessing the films of my favorite director

Terrence Malick is my favorite director. He can be a divisive figure; critics dismiss him as a pretentious airhead who would rather film grass blowing in the wind than tell a story. But these complaints always seem tin-eared to me. For one thing, most of his movies have more satisfying plots than people claim; Badlands, for example, is an expertly crafted Bonnie-and-Clyde story even while it’s a distant and dreamlike meditation on nature and man. It’s useful to understand that, first, Malick was once a graduate student in philosophy, studying Heidegger I believe. His considerations of the eternal connection between all things and the conflict between the ways of man and the ways of nature are deeply informed by a personal search for the truth. He is also a profoundly religious filmmaker. Notoriously private, Malick is not exactly out there declaring his particular relationship to faith in interviews. But there’s an obvious Christian spirit to his work, and he is utterly unselfconscious about exploring straightforwardly religious themes in his work, which is one of many things that put him out of fashion with most contemporary filmmakers.

You may feel free to dissent in the comments and impress everybody by saying you hate Terrence Malick’s films. You are however not going to change my mind. Any film in the top half of this list is in my top 25 favorite movies of all time. And there is not one movie on this list that does not include moments of spectacular visual beauty. No matter what else Malick has, he will always have that.

This is only his features. I’m not including documentaries or shorts.

9. Knight of Cups

This one really doesn’t work for me. The story of a screenwriter, played by Christian Bale, who arrives in Hollywood and discovers its insularity and excess, the movie never really congeals in any meaningful way. Knight of Cups is the one Malick film that really deserves the charge of aimlessness and portentous voiceover. There’s plotlines regarding the protagonist’s love life and his complicated relationships with his brother and father, but the film is just too focused on the sky for those to pay off. It’s a shame because “Terrence Malick depicts the cynicism and emptiness of Hollywood’s culture” sounds like a great premise, and there are brief moments of such a critical purpose that really work. It’s also a shame because the trailer for Knight of Cups is one of the best I’ve ever seen. When that priest starts speaking and the music comes up, whoo, that hits me. Shame it wasn’t attached to a better movie.