The best film anyone has done in years and years.

Rating: 10/10 (9 January 1999)

Though The Thin Red Line has some serious narrative faults, it is one of the greatest movies of the past decade. A few years from now when the critics won't be thinking about Private Ryan so much, they'll maybe let this film happen to them the way it is intended to. Malick is unparalleled in using film images as poetry, as metaphor, as suggestion . . . and his is a subtle art that is lost on many people. Though Malick relies heavily on voice-overs, it is imperative to WATCH his films to understand what is happening and where the characters are. During Malick's insufferable absence from the film scene, audiences (and a hell of a lot of critics) have been conditioned to watch movies on TV screens, a change in viewing habits that has proved to be more deleterious to the quality of American films than anything else ever has. One of the most obvious problems this has created is the way widescreens have been wasted on films that are really designed to be cropped for TV screen aspect -- the very language of film, the picture, has been limited. But The Thin Red Line is almost defiant in its magnificent use of widescreen; in its use of pictures to tell stories (not A story), to create atmospheres and environments, to let the characters roam about the frame; and its general use of the ambience of a movie theater to create a sensation that is bigger than any of us. And yet, for such a giant movie, it is so introverted and intimate that its power will creep up on you and stick to you like nothing else, as long as you just let the film happen to you. See it on the big screen, as it will make no sense when the video companies chop the sides off the picture so you can watch it on your 20" TVs with those two ineffectual, tinny speakers squawking out Zimmer's sublime score.