This weekend a friend of mine invited me to join him for a screening at BAM of Terence Malick's The Tree of Life with a live orchestra. 'But that's only for silent films,' I thought. I said yes right away more to spend time with my friend than to see the film again which I had very much admired but not quite loved in 2011.
Seeing it again five years later proved unexpectedly rewarding. Perhaps it was the huge screen - the first time I'd seen it was on a tiny arthouse screen in Manhattan. Perhaps it was the live accompaniment of a huge orchestra and choir but it felt newly electric...
Murtada here. It’s the week of fall film festivals announcements. We just heard that The Bening is going to New York. Lupita Nyong'o and Rosamund Pike are going to both London and Toronto. Let’s check in with a few others who are going to Venice, Toronto and possibly Telluride (Telluride doesn’t announce its program until its first day but if a film is announced as a Canadian Premiere at TIFF, and it hasn’t appeared at Sundance, it’s assumed to be Telluride bound).
Leave it to Terrence Malick to always keep us guessing when his next film will drop. Recently we got word that his long-rumored documentary Voyage of Time would finally be dropping this fall and on massive IMAX screens to boot - before the star filled Weightless that he shot back-to-back with this year's Knight of Cups. Like his movies, I guess the release schedules and post-production meander as well.
But even without Weightless's star power, Voyage will pack wattage of its own. Ennio Morricone will be scoring the film, reuniting him with the director after almost forty years since they collaborated on Days of Heaven. And there may not be recognizable faces on screen among the eyepopping visuals, but Brad Pitt narrates (Cate Blanchett is set to narrate the extended, non-IMAX version that is also rumored).
If you have your doubts about another Mallick meditation on existance, consider that this version will be running at a swift forty minutes. Without a narrative to distract from the auteur's transfixing visuals (albeit this time without Emmanuel Lubezki behind the camera), this one should give us precisely what we want from him without the frustrations of his recent work. Check out the just released trailer and imagine it on a huge IMAX screen:
Voyage of Time opens in IMAX on October 7. What other Mallick film would you see in IMAX?
Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we look at the medium's flatlining box office is a sign of 2016's roster of documentaries.
Looking at Nathaniel’s listing of the highest grossing documentaries list of the year so far and I was – to put it mildly – a bit bummed out. Not surprised, of course.
Certainly, the comfort of one’s home is a perfectly fine place to view many of these films, and a necessary advancement given the general downturn in boutique and arthouse cinema-going. But as a lover of movies, going to the movies, and writing about movies, it is frustrating and a worry that no documentaries other than Michael Moore’s disappointing Where to Invade Next and the Christian-themed Patterns of Evidence have made any sort of impact at the box office (and even then, Moore’s film is a dramatic slide from even his most recent film Capitalism: A Love Story at $14m) in four months of the new year.
The reason the doc box office figures particularly worried me was because the first quarter of the year is peak opportunity to take advantage of a quiet marketplace...
Manuel here with a short list about Terrence Malick’s most recent outing. Knight of Cups will sit alongside Tree of Life and To the Wonder in what we might call the director’s spiritual trilogy and however you felt about those last two outings will color how you see his latest. Since the film is a roving set of overlapping and interlocking duets—we follow Christian Bale’s Rick, a successful Hollywood writer through Los Angeles and Las Vegas as he has dalliances with beautiful women and deals with the demons that afflict all troubled artists—I figured I’d pick out 5 pairs of Malick collaborators that truly shine in this dreamy poem of a film.
Consider it our version of praising the parts while remaining underwhelmed (or just ill-equipped) to praise the sum...
Monday, November 21, 2016 at 7:44PM 
