The New World
New Line Cinema | Release Date: December 25, 2005 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
69
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 38 Critic Reviews
Positive:
27
Mixed:
11
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Los Angeles TimesCarina Chocano
A work of breathtaking imagination, less a movie than a mode of transport, and in every sense a masterpiece. Read full review
100
New York Daily NewsJami Bernard
In the end, it's a sweeping, important film that overturns everything you learned in school about the birth of this nation. Read full review
100
PremiereAaron 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. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger 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. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy 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." Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
A masterpiece. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyLisa 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. Read full review
91
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam 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. Read full review
91
Baltimore SunMichael 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. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter 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. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael 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. Read full review
88
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie 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. Read full review
83
Portland OregonianShawn 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. Read full review
80
NewsweekDavid 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. Read full review
80
TimeRichard 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. Read full review
80
The New YorkerAnthony 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. Read full review
80
The New York TimesManohla 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. Read full review
80
The A.V. ClubKeith 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. Read full review
80
Dallas ObserverLuke Y. Thompson
At the heart of it all is an entrancing lead performance by the teenage Kilcher. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
The New World is beautiful and lyrical and, except for the ill-advised voiceovers, a treat for more than one of the senses. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorPeter 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. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterKirk 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. Read full review
70
SlateDana 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. Read full review
63
USA TodayMike 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. Read full review
63
TV Guide MagazineMaitland 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. Read full review
63
Charlotte ObserverLawrence 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. Read full review
63
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. Read full review
60
Village VoiceJ. 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. Read full review
50
VarietyTodd 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. Read full review
50
L.A. WeeklyScott 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. Read full review
50
New York PostLou Lumenick
This lavish coffee-table-book of a movie gradually reveals itself as an uninvolving, crashing bore. Read full review
50
SalonStephanie 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. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoe 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.
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie 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. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderJonathan 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. Read full review
50
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
For all its splendor, The New World is really a love affair between Malick and his camera. Read full review
50
Washington PostStephen 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. Read full review
50
The New RepublicStanley 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. Read full review
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