The New World

Terrence Malick, the universally acclaimed American filmmaker responsible for the key 1970s features Badlands and Days of Heaven, returns for a rare directorial outing with the sweeping period piece The New World -- an epic dramatization of Pocahontas' relationships with John Smith and John Rolfe. ...more

Terrence Malick aims for a kind of psychological realism through poetics in this stupendous reexamination of the Pocahontas myth. From the opening, when a group of frolicking Powhatan natives spy the approaching ships of Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) from the future Virginia's verdant shores, it's clear that Malick is less interested in historical accuracy than in a ground-level positing of how colonization was emotionally experienced when Jacobean England discovered a "new world." As in ...more