Metascore

Generally favorable reviews - based on 38 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 170 Ratings

  • Starring: Christopher Plummer, Colin Farrell, Q'orianka Kilcher
  • Summary: 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) Expand
  • Director: Terrence Malick
  • Genre(s): Adventure, Biography, Drama, History, Romance
  • Rating: PG-13
  • Runtime: 135 min
  • More Details and Credits »
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 27 out of 38
  2. Negative: 0 out of 38
  1. 100
    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.
  2. At the heart of it all is an entrancing lead performance by the teenage Kilcher.
  3. 80
    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.
  4. 60
    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.

See all 38 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 68 out of 102
  2. Negative: 26 out of 102
  1. Terrence Malick is a genius and a real artist. Exactly... This film is lighter then The Thin Red Line, but The New World is an amazing philosophical orgasm. Long and slow, even so beautiful and never dull. Colin Farrell is a great actor, but the best was Christian Bale. The script is lyrical, the shot is wonderful. Need more? Expand
  2. Stephen
    8
    If The Thin Red Line was - emphatically
  3. PatC.
    7
    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. Expand
  4. HyZ.
    4
    I must have seen a different film. The one I saw worked so hard at creating a sense of awe and awakening that it overshot the mark.The endless montage of nature turns that beauty into a calendar of sunsets backed by powerful symphonic strains that are so continuous they sound like computer sound loops. How many times can you do "grandeur" in one film? Beyond this I wonder how these characters get to think in such contemporary terms? The obsessive costume design and the detail photography of it were also distracting. But Malicks efforts for authenticity seem to stop at the visual. This film is all dressed up with no place to go. It is a meditation on a dream that doesn't really hold together when its retold. It just repeats the same simplistic view backed by manipulative photography and music. Expand

See all 102 User Reviews

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