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New World, The
New Line Cinema


6.6

based on 38 reviews
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based on 136 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for some intense battle sequences

Starring Colin Farrell, Q'Orianka Kilcher, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, August Schellenberg, Wes Studi, David Thewlis, and Yorick van Wageningen

The New World is a sweeping adventure set amidst the first encounter of European and Native American cultures during the founding of the Jamestown Virginia settlement in 1607. Acclaimed filmmaker Terence Malick brings to life his own unique interpretation of the classic tale of Pocahontas and her relationships with adventurer John Smith and aristocrat John Rolfe. This woman's remarkable journey of love lost and found takes her from the untouched beauty of the Virginia wilderness to the upper crust of English socirty as we witness the dawn of a new America. (New Line Productions)

GENRE(S):	Adventure \| Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Terrence Malick
DIRECTED BY:	Terrence Malick
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: May 9, 2006 Theatrical: December 25, 2005
RUNNING TIME:	minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

NBR Award, Best Breakthrough Performance by an Actress (Kilcher), 2005 National Board of Review

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

A work of breathtaking imagination, less a movie than a mode of transport, and in every sense a masterpiece.

100

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

In the end, it's a sweeping, important film that overturns everything you learned in school about the birth of this nation.

100

Premiere Aaron Hillis

Scene for radiant scene, shot for nary a wasted shot, The New World is the most artfully sculpted film in American cinema this year.

100

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Pocahontas was given the gift of sensing the whole picture, and that is what Malick founds his film on, not tawdry stories of love and adventure. He is a visionary, and this story requires one.

100

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The New World is something I don't think I've ever seen before on a movie screen: an epic lyrical dialectic. Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's "Badlands."

100

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

A masterpiece.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Despite its haphazard rhythms and longueurs, The New World achieves an emotional payoff unlike anything else in Malick's work. It's all you think his movies are, and more.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It's a richly textured, leisurely paced, visually impressionistic epic of the American past that fairly hypnotizes the viewer with its tapestry of sights, sounds and colors.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Many have tried, but none can match Malick's touch for shuffling a deck of elegiac images (water/sky/clouds/rain) and fanning out the hand to express what speech cannot; he's a master, too, of incorporating sound that is often wordless but never empty.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki -- a grandmaster at blending color and natural light -- craft a tone poem that may throw some audiences through its use of interior monologues.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Malick's nature documentarian impulse has never been more flagrant than in The New World, yet it has never made more organic sense. The film, which is superb on every technical and design level, has both greatness and fuzzy-headedness in it.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Not since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Malick's own "Days of Heaven" has a movie been both so breathtakingly beautiful and so narratively abstract.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Malick is a unique director of extraordinary gifts, of that there can be no doubt. If he ever chooses to shoot a script as fine as his technique, he will surely produce a masterpiece of the medium.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Whole passages of non-event stream by, and you half want to scream, and yet--damn it all--by the end of The New World the spell of the images, plus the enigma of Kilcher's expression (she is as sculpted as an idol, and every bit as amenable to worship), somehow breaks you down.

Newsweek David Ansen

Malick's magnificent, frustrating epic mixes fact and legend to conjure up a reverie about Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher), her love for Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) and her crossing from one culture to another.

Time Richard Corliss

This is no breathless film fantasy; its pulse is stately, contemplative. But anyone who has keen eyes and an open heart will surely go soaring and crashing with the lovers lost in Malick's exotic, erotic new world.

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

At the heart of it all is an entrancing lead performance by the teenage Kilcher.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

However complicated the historical issues at play, the poetic introspection that consumes The New World's characters could only take place in a Terrence Malick movie. But, here at least, history and lyrical drift go together surprisingly well.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

If the affair seems strangely ethereal, as if it were taking place in another dimension, in a lovelier, more enchanted realm, it is because Mr. Malick is fashioning a countermythology in The New World, one to replace, or at least challenge, a mythology already in place.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The New World is beautiful and lyrical and, except for the ill-advised voiceovers, a treat for more than one of the senses.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The idealization of the native American existence in The New World, precolonization, is a pleasing fantasy but also timeworn and ahistorical. Surely someone as sophisticated as Malick - who once taught philosophy at MIT and was a Rhodes scholar - understands that he is putting forth a fabrication.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

This is resolutely a film of the imagination. As with all films in Malick's slim body of work, its imagery, haunting sounds and pastoral mood trump narrative.

Slate Dana Stevens

The New World takes a shopworn American myth--and runs it through the Malick-izer, making it feel rich, strange, and new. In so doing, the film takes wild liberties with historical accuracy.

USA Today Mike Clark

Pocahontas catching us off-guard with an impromptu cartwheel isn't the knock-you-down brainstorm of Naomi Watts juggling for King Kong, but it's still deliciously inspired. Trouble is, the bit lasts two seconds, while the movie is a long "might have been" that's doomed to be buried in a flurry of strong late-year releases.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

First written in the early '80s, Terrence Malick's fourth film in three decades is a trancelike take on the relationship of Native American princess Matoaka - better known by the nickname Pocahontas and English adventurer John Smith.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Perhaps the director should make only silent movies. Scenes where characters communicate via eyes and body language usually work here, even if we don't know exactly what's going on.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Yes, a Terence Malick film remains an event, but he appears awfully disoriented in The New World -- less a seasoned traveller than a perplexed tourist, content to mask his confusion by reaching for a camera and snapping relentless pretty pictures.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Malick's long, moody, diaphanous account of love and loss in 17th-century Jamestown--shot, more or less, on location--rarely achieves the symphonic grandeur it seeks. As an epic, it's monumentally slight.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

Well before The New World's two-and-one-half hours are up, Malick's tree-hugging reveries have become suffocating, no matter the unquestionable tastefulness with which they're rendered -- more painterly vistas, more Wagner (and a little Mozart, too), ravishing re-creations of 17th-century London. Surely, only a Philistine could find any fault with this, or believe, perchance, that Malick's famous poetic beauty had turned poetically fatal.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Malick's exalted visuals and isolated metaphysical epiphanies are ill-supported by a muddled, lurching narrative, resulting in a sprawling, unfocused account of an epochal historical moment.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

This lavish coffee-table-book of a movie gradually reveals itself as an uninvolving, crashing bore.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

This is like a Tony Scott movie on quaaludes: Words and pictures are matched up in counterintuitive ways, and although the cutting is much slower than in Scott's hyperactive showboating, it makes just about as much sense. The movie's leisureliness is aggressive; the picture is artfully designed to make you feel that if you're bored, it's your own damn fault.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The New World is stately almost to the point of being static and thus has trouble finding a central story around which to arrange itself; it's not quite the thin dead line, but it's close.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Malick continues to float along the edge of the American film world as an unusually intelligent personage who occasionally delivers the fruit of his meditations. But his role as adjunct philosophe is better than the films he eventually gives us.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

For all its splendor, The New World is really a love affair between Malick and his camera.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Malick still has an eye for landscapes, but since "Badlands" (1973) his storytelling skill has atrophied, and he's now given to transcendental reveries, discontinuous editing, offscreen monologues, and a pie-eyed sense of awe. All these things can be defended, even celebrated, but I couldn't find my bearings.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

If only the showmanship were equal to the scholarship. As beautiful as the film is (despite notable variations in the quality of the cinematography), it is also sluggish, underdramatized after that initial suspense, and for the most part emotionally remote.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

As the camera moves through the tall grass of this new world, there comes the realization that we could be within any one of Terrence Malick's movies, any one of the previous three stunners he has made in his 35-year-long career.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 136 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Pat C. gave it a7:
The style in which the story is told lacks continuity and personality development, resulting in a persistent sluggishness. Yet it is lavish audiovisually, does not impose stereotypes, and draws one completely into the world that was the first frontier of our country. Its technique is wanting, but its heart is in the right place. Not necessarily time well spent, but not time wasted either.

Paul P. gave it a3:
A real snoozer. The cinematography was great, but don't watch this if you want to stay awake.

M L gave it a10:
Lyrical, beautiful and romantic. One of the year's most underrated films. Like a well-written book, this movie transports its viewers (believably) to another world, another time. Chemistry between Smith and Pocahontas believable and steamy.

Marcel G. gave it a10:
Malick's fertile imagination combines perfectly with his furtive politics; this Pocahontas isn't plucked from her environment. She leads John Smith around by his tail and leaves everybody, audience included, with much to reflect on in this recreation of an old and no doubt tall tale.

[Anonymous] gave it a6:
Ironically, Malick's direction is what undermines this film's potential. His muddled narrative and overuse of long shots slows the whole thing to a beautiful, but dull bore. Of course, the cinematography brings about some redeeming moments, especially those gorgeous shots of the sunset over water, but ultimately, Terrence Malick's own direction sinks the project in dullness. Sure, Malick has his own taste, but its because of that taste that his films don't earn much. Only for those with the greatst patience.

Greg A. gave it a0:
There is good art and bad art; good poetry and bad poetry. This was just bad. The film took to extreme the fashion for portraying poetry and sensitivity through long, supposedly meaningful silences and lack of dialogue. It was almost as if the actors were miming their roles. This conspiracy against speech in an attempt to be artistic is not clever or challenging. It is lazy, simplistic and, to my mind, dishonest. In addition, the verbal and linguistic inaccuracy was embarrassing and the scenes of England, London and the court of James I were risible.

JGM gave it a7:
All the criticisms you'll read here are accurate: this movie is overlong, thin on plot, often indecipherable, self-indulgent, and generally artsy-fartsy. And yet, one forgives Malik all of this and more in exchange for the gift of the incredible visual feast. Watch any 30 minutes of this, then switch to anything else, and you'll be shocked at how pedestrian, how ugly, most of what comes across the screen is. And, it's not about "smarts" but about viewpoint. A film like this has to be approached as you would approach a series of paintings or a symphony, complete with repeating motif and variations on a theme. If you have the temprement to view a 2+ hour work in this way, the visuals will reward. And the art here is all visual: the dialog is sparse and often intentionally muddy. The acting is mostly wooden and beside the point, with the luminous exception of young Ms. Kilcher, who seems to understand and inhabit this character completely.

New World, The New Line Cinema

New World, The
New Line Cinema