Well. I suppose that I could always say, "How about one-hundred-and-twenty-five, then?" or some such thing, but at a certain point the list-making has got to stop. And so now to answer the commenters asking "But what about...?"
Terrence Malick's The New World. I ought to have known it would come up. It was not omitted out of forgetfulness, and on the other hand I could have made life easy for myself and listed it and made my case based on what I admire about it. But I don't want to be evasive, or coy, or cute about it; I am very ambivalent about the picture. I am not ambivalent about it because I'm overly bothered by the non-linear editing. Nor am I bugged by the shot durations. I don't feel it often devolves into an unrelated series of pretty pictures. And I think the use of Wagner in the picture is not merely apt but moving. In fact, I think the way the Rheingold music helps complete the circle the film's ending makes with its beginning is sheer bloody genius, and that the way the film's ending links to its beginning would be sheer bloody genius even without the music.
No, my objection to The New World is that it introduces a heretofore unknown quantity into the Malickean universe: that of sentimentality. Too often what is strange and striking and, yes, new about this vision is undercut by a seepage of pious treacle. As in, to name one for-instance, the bit in the section titled "A Proposal" in which Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas communes with a tree. "Other people direct movie. Terrence Malick builds cathedrals," pronounced one of this film's most passionate champions, Matt Zoller Seitz. Too often in this film Malick seems to be announcing that he's building a cathedral, and there's a concomitant sogginess of thought in that which skews the detachment that makes the beauty of his prior films so bracing and unusual. I prefer cinematic poetry with a somewhat stiffer spine, finally.
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