The Thin Red Line

After a 20-year hiatus, Badlands and Days of Heaven director Terrence Malick emerged from premature retirement with this unexpected but searching adaptation of James Jones’s autobiographical novel about the WWII battle of Guadalcanal. The Thin Red Line is a lyrical, meditative war movie, a philosophical discourse on war itself which doesn’t have a central heroic arc, but rather like one of Wim Wenders’s Berlin angels, leans in and eavesdrops on the thoughts of combatants on both sides of the battle lines. That sense of an omniscience is reflected in images of breathtaking beauty (DP: John Toll) and one of Hans Zimmer’s most spiritual scores.

Staff Pick: Alan & Ingrid

There has truly never been a film about modern war quite like this one: a kind of lyric epic poem about the way men are transformed for good by the experience of war, carefully balancing romanticism and dispassion, action and introspection.

Gavin Smith, Film Comment

A haunting, scattered reminiscence piece, where the mind is allowed to drift through its memories, and retrieve impressions of the beautiful and the hideous, the serene and the hysterical, the banal and the profound.

Jack Matthews, LA Times

It wrestles with complexity, speaks to us in poetry, weaves multiple narrative strands into a tapestry, opens the festering wounds of war and gazes inside without blinking.

Norman Green, Film.com

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