Perhaps the most tantalising and mysterious talent in American
cinema. Malick's reputation rests on only three films, all dominated
by the theme of man's relationship to his landscape. Badlands, his
classic depiction of disenchanted youth, was an astonishing debut.
Days of Heaven was a more opaque follow-up, but there is no denying its
formal beauty, sense of space, or the beguiling sadness of its
atmosphere. Malick then pulled off a remarkable disappearing act,
returning twenty years later with The Thin Red Line. In this film as in
the others, his characters are rootless, restless and strain almost
poetically against inarticulacy in an attempt to achieve a state of
grace.
