If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I can't believe the high scores for this movie. It was on my cable channel and had high 90's on two review scores so I recorded it. The narrator has the most annoying voice and accent and her voice does not project to the audience at all. The old man who worked for the farmer was the best actor. The photography was beautiful. Everything else was mediocre at best. It just dragged along to an abysmal ending. I cannot believe people are comparing this to movies like Casa Blanca. This is just average. The whole premise could have been developed into a great movie. I guess I don't like this director's style.

Terrence Malick's masterpiece, Days of Heaven, is from 1978 and stars Richard Gere, Sam Shepard, Brooke Adams, and Linda Manz.People have written here about the cinematography - there's nothing I can add to it - certainly one of the most gorgeous films ever done, absolutely staggering.The story takes place in 1916. Bill (Gere) and Abby (Adams) are boyfriend and girlfriend who pose as brother and sister. After Bill punches a man (Stuart Margolin) and he winds up dead, the two of them, along with Bill's sister Linda (Manz) travel from Chicago to the Texas panhandle looking for work.The owner of the farm where they wind up, (Shepard) falls for Abby, and, when Bill finds out he's terminally ill, urges Abby to marry him. After the wedding, Bill and Linda stay on at the farm with Bill doing jobs around the place. Meanwhile he's meeting Abby secretly. Jealousy, impatience, and tragedy follow.Not much dialogue to be had here - apparently Malick threw out the script and let the actors "find" the story. The three leads - were any of us ever that young? They're beautiful. All the acting is very internalized, and it works here beautifully - it's all in the facial expressions, the eyes - it could almost be a silent movie. Though it's a languid film, there is an underlying tension throughout. The one rough spot for me was Linda Manz and her New York accent. People from Chicago do not talk like that, and in fact I had a difficult time understanding her, which made her an odd choice for the narrator. Children are naturals, they don't have any social barriers or inhibitions, so I'm never impressed by child actors though many of them are fabulous. I didn't feel that she had much to offer. Malick felt differently, and it's his movie, I just didn't think her gifts showed on screen.This is a must-see film - haunting and atmospheric and incredibly beautiful.

Terrence Malick burst onto the movie scene with 1973's "Badlands", about a teenage couple on a crime spree. A well-directed, well-shot movie, it suggested that Malick would be one of the new upstanding directors emerging at the time (Spielberg, DePalma, Coppola, etc).His next effort, 1978's "Days of Heaven", was a worthy effort but no masterpiece. The first few minutes of the movie are the best part. Had the movie kept its focus there, it probably would have been as much of a masterpiece as "Badlands" was. Instead, it's a so-so look at the tensions arising from a love triangle. I will say that the locust scene is pretty impressive, though.Malick took a twenty-year break from directing after this, returning with "The Thin Red Line". It was also a worthy effort but had too narrow of a focus to amount to something that was worth watching. His next effort was "The New World", which was too long and too slow (seriously, had they trimmed half an hour it might have managed to be mediocre). I didn't see "The Tree of Life" but my parents told me that it sucked. Basically, Malick gets progressively worse as a director.The visuals in "Days of Heaven" get a lot of praise. I'm sorry, but visuals without a solid plot serve no purpose (contrast that with Todd Haynes's movies, wherein the visuals emphasize the lie that the women are living). In short, I'll call this movie Malick's last movie that's really worth seeing. After this, his work turned into pseudo-intellectual, Oscar bait wannabe.

Yes, it looks good. Yes, setting and premise make you think you are a in for a great story. No, there is no great story and it actually ends up being the same old story.Terrance Malick might be good at a lot of things but writing is not one of them.I love the look and feel of this movie, The New World and The Tree of Life but they all leave me disappointed. I don't believe them. The pictures pull you in and the writing pulls me out.Character development is so weak in this film you really don't care what happens to any of these people. What they are doing working in the fields is anybodies guess but it looks like Malick told them to pick up a rake and act like you're doing something. No attention to detail.