To Start Off With ...
Above my Top Ten, I’m listing the entire output of Terrence Malick from 2010 to 2017, which is undoubtedly my favourite cinematic work from this decade. I rewatched each of these movies, trying to settle on one to place at the top of my list, but Malick’s body of work amounts to a greater achievement than the sum of its parts, and the ideas, emotions, images, and stories that flow through each of them form threads that can start in one movie and run through another.
The Tree of Life is the movie that awakened me to the full possibilities of movies, of how great thought and feeling can be conveyed through sounds and images, and of how deeply and intimately I could be moved by any movie. Malick searches for and devises new ways of looking at every subject (and every object), and each image in his movies packs a concentration of meaning, a focus on the essence and potential of each living thing and the matter that surrounds it, and an abiding sense of the eternal and the cosmic scheme into which it fits. I look at my own world differently now after having seen through Malick’s lens, and it’s a wondrous transformation.