The New World

Pros: Excellent Cinematography and makeup.
Cons: Too pretentious, story not compelling. annoying voiceovers..

(The film student must have Cinematography 101 and Basic Film Making to take this course.) Hello, I'm Terrence Malick, and I am the instructor for pretentious film making. You may remember me for such pretentious films as The Thin Red Line and ...

Pros: Malick's Script/Direction, Lubezki's Cinematography, Production, Editing, Music, & Cast.
Cons: None, Except for the Wait of Director's Cut.

***Note: The Following is a Review of the 137-minute cut of Terrence Malick’s The New World that was given a wide release for 1/20/06, not the 155-minute theatrical release in late December 2005 for New York City & Los Angeles*** The story ...

Pros: Cinematography, Kilcher.
Cons: Labored; un-involving and unmoving; somewhat sentimental, despite improvements over Disney et al.

Terrence Malick’s fourth major feature in over three decades, The New World tells the story of two peoples colliding, sometimes violently, sometimes felicitously: colonial English settlers and Native Americans at the site of Jamestown, ...

Pros: Q'Orianka Kilcher; Colin Farrell; exceptional photography; exquisite direction
Cons: Loooooooooong; some actors and characters expendable; hollow rendering of events; those inner monologues

Terrence Malick has two incomparable talents as an American film maker. First, the man is one of the most visually expressive directors working in cinema. He shoots landscapes as an elegiac dream vision integrating man and the supernatural. Viewers ...

Pros: Q'Orianka Kilcher's performance as Pocahontas, stunning cinematography
Cons: Languid pacing, distracting jump cuts to black screen, uninspired score

Terence Malick’s poetic soul runs right through “The New World,” his romantic retelling of the Pocahontas legend. In many ways, perhaps most ways...that’s a good thing. But in a couple of significant ways, it drags the film down. One ...

Pros: The first half is fascinating as the discovery of America is retold.
Cons: Too long, too irrelevant. The actors mumble their lines.

Q'orianka Kilcher … Pocahantas Collin Farrell … John Smith Christian Bale …John Rolfe Christopher Plummer ... Captain Christopher Newport When will directors learn to use the word “cut” and “edit” in their movies? When will they differentiate ...

Pros: Nice scenery of Virginia marshes. And thank God it wasn't longer.
Cons: Just about everything else.

Maximum, an hour to tell this story. It was more than two hours looong. Laborious, sloooow, and not enough history to bother with. Very little dialog and much of what there was was incomprehensible. I will say only four of the ten people in the theater left before the end of the movie. At the end most viewers stared at the screen in disbelief.