Terrence Malick

Twenty years separate Days of Heaven in 1978 from The Thin Red Line in 1998, and that gap is the single most discussed fact about Malick. He came up with the New Hollywood generation, made two films that people still argue about, and then simply stopped releasing work for two decades.

The method is unmistakable. Voiceover that is not narration but private argument, often addressed to God or a dead relative. Natural light and a camera that keeps drifting off the actor toward weather, grass, water, a child at the edge of frame. Plot treated as an interruption. When it works, as it does in The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, it produces something no other filmmaker can get near: a war picture that keeps stopping to look at a bird, a family drama that widens into the formation of the planet without embarrassment. He has received the Palme d'Or, the Golden Bear and the Cannes best director award, along with nominations for three Academy Awards.

After The Tree of Life the pace increased sharply and the returns fell. To the Wonder, Knight of Cups and Song to Song apply the same technique to thinner material, and the method starts to look like mannerism when there is no war and no childhood underneath it. A Hidden Life in 2019 reintroduced a story, a moral question and a fixed setting, and the improvement is immediate. He also turns up as an actor in the credits filed here, uncredited, as a caller at a rich man's house in Badlands and a mill worker in Days of Heaven.