Terrence Malick's Disciples

The final act and ending of Rublev is in my opinion the greatest ending in all of film. So brilliant, you can be thinking the rest of the film is slow and tough to decipher, but it pays off as the ending hits so well.

If you liked Andrei Rublev, you should check out Alexei German's adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers "Hard to Be a God." It's insane, gorgeous, disgusting, teetering on the edge of madness, and monumental.

German's "Khrustalyov, My Car!" is also the purest cinematic distilation of paranoia I have ever seen.

Days of Heaven (1978)

I recommend turning on subtitles for Tree of Life. There's a lot of random whispered voice-overs, and without subs you'll have no idea who is speaking, let alone what they are saying.

Or dive at the deep end and watch Knight of Cups or A Hidden Life. You will either like it or not, frankly I don't think it matters what you'll see first, I love all of his movies even though I didn't understand Thin Red Line when I was 20. But Knight of Cups hit me hard when I was 36.

Badlands and Days of Heaven are definitely his most conventional films and thus good starting points. Badlands especially is a great film, Days of Heaven is a bit uneven in terms of plot and pacing, but the cinematography is beautiful.

Then you have The Thin Red Line and The New World, which to me feel like a transitional period between the more conventional films and The Tree of Life, which is the first film that is characterized through and through by Malick's extremely divisive style. I personally love The Thin Red Line, but I can see why it's not for everyone. (I would skip The New World.) All later films have a very recognizable style, for which I think The Tree of Life is the best starting point.

Long story short: I'd start with Badlands, then watch The Thin Red Line, then The Tree of Life. If you like the last one, watch any of his later films.

David Lynch perhaps.

> And I think most people who love his films appreciate them in a snobbish way; they really try to convince themselves that it is great cinema.

Absolutely he is very much a snobbery magnet. Same as Tarkovsky.

The reasons I like him: I like the visual style, the poetic narrative structure, and the cinematographic techniques: camera work, lighting, etc. The second part I think is what trips up most people. Not many people like poetry nowadays. I can only think of two people in my circle of acquaintances and both were English majors, one is an English teacher. So it's a bit like that with films -- to some people it looks like disjointed random scenes that don't make sense, to someone else it looks like visual poetry.

> But most of us, and not because we are simpletons, don't go to movies to see actors doing chores. It might be for others, but not for me.

That's a perfectly fine view of cinema. I think most of it should be that way. If people pay their hard earned money to see something, it should be something they'd enjoy and not random disjoined scenes that don't make sense. That's why folks like Malick are a director's director. It's someone who film makers look up to, but not someone the majority of filmgoers would recognize or appreciate much, and for good reasons either way.

Interesting - I got something completely different out of The Thin Red Line. To me it was fascinating to see how different people processed the war and their different struggles, whether philosophical (Private Witt), with relationships back home (Cpt Staros), or PTSD. It was a little scattered as it bounced between so many soldiers but the central theme seemed to centre around Pvt Witt and Sgt Welsh - the actual battle was almost secondary. IMO there’s no snobbery - though Malick is maybe a little self indulgent - and I enjoyed movies like Saving Private Ryan or even Fury just as much.