BADLANDS

Directed by Terrence Malick
Starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek

(1973) “I can’t allow that,” states soft-spoken James Dean-influenced garbage man Martin Sheen, just prior to cold-blooded murder. Malick’s debut is a classic outlaw-couple-on-the-run story, based on the Starkweather/Fugate case, with Sheen taking teenage baton twirler Sissy Spacek –after blasting her father Warren Oates– on a killing spree across the prairies towards Saskatchewan – where Sheen plans to become a Mountie. But that’s only the first level of Malick’s unique work, the continuing mayhem accompanied by surrealistically opaque dialogue; distanced by dazzling color photography of ethereal dreamlike landscapes (at one point, in the middle of nowhere, they dance to the car radio in headlight beams and a semi-classical score in counterpoint); all narrated in the past tense in Spacek’s romance magazine style: “He wanted to die with me and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms.” Malick cameos as the architect, because “we didn’t have enough money to fly someone in” – but seeing himself onscreen proved so traumatic that he’s been camera-shy ever since. He waited another five years until his next film, Days of Heaven, then took a two-decade break before his third, The Thin Red Line. DCP. Approx. 95 mins.
2:25, 6:15, 10:10

“THE FINEST FEATURE DEBUT EVER!”
– Time Out 

“THE MOST ASSURED FIRST FILM BY AN AMERICAN SINCE CITIZEN KANE. The story moves with an energetic fatalism. Above all, Badlands balanced the externals of landscape and violence with their imaginative resonance. It was legitimate for the film to avoid explanation because the action was so dense and eloquent, the myth so solid and matter-of-fact.”
– Dave Thomson

“So rich in ideas in hardly knows where to turn. Transcendent themes of love and death are fused with a pop-culture sensibility and played out against a midwestern background, which is breathtaking both in its sweep and in its banality. Days of Heaven put Malick’s intuitions into cogent form, but this is where his art begins.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“One of the most impressive directorial debuts ever.”
– Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London)

“Brilliantly composed with a loose, directionless swing that looks easy (but isn’t), and a superbly delicate, literate voiceover from Spacek that conveys the bizarre babes-in-the-wood quality of their life together on the run…An unmissable, transcendentally beautiful classic.”
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Cool, sometimes brilliant, always ferociously American…Badlands is a most important and exciting film.”
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“This first, magnificent, outpouring of the sporadic genius of cinema’s equivalent to JD Salinger, Terrence Malick, still seems terrifically modern…A film of ‘visionary realism,’ Badlands is as psychologically precise as it is splendidly visually observant. But it also exudes a timeless, mythical and tragic quality which is all the more remarkable for the languorous ease with which its story unfolds. Infused with an uncharacterisable romanticism, and employing one of the most entrancing uses of soundtrack music – from the honey voice of Nat King Cole to the jaunty yet haunting xylophone of George Aliceson Tipton – since Pasolini’s ‘Gospel According to St Matthew’, it’s a challengingly non-judgmental work which lulls the viewer into a sublime state of false security, the better to deliver a stunning but gentle essay on freedom and necessity, life and death.”
– Wally Hammond, Time Out (London)

“The blueprint for Malick’s entire output, marked by near-whispered narration and communion with the natural world. He’s never quite topped it…Badlands is the American myth of freedom and violence; it doesn’t get old because it remains what we are.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

DAYS OF HEAVEN

Directed by Terrence Malick
Starring Richard Gere and Sam Shepard

(1978) 1916, and Chicagoans Richard Gere, kid sister Linda Manz, and lover Brooke Adams head for the Texas Panhandle to work the wheat fields of prosperous farmer Sam Shepard. An ensuing marriage is only the beginning of a bizarre love triangle, ending with violent death amid a spectacular locust plague, and a Badlands-style manhunt for a killer. DCP. Approx. 95 mins.
12:30, 4:20, 8:10

“HEARTBREAKING. The proper way into the gorgeously lyrical movies of Terrence Malick.”
– Time Out

“The images are underlined by the famous score of Ennio Morricone. The music is wistful, filled with loss and regret…more remembered than experienced.”
– Roger Ebert

“Almost incontestably the most gorgeously photographed film ever made.”
– Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

“[Malick’s] peach-hued masterwork…Visually and thematically, it’s still one of the most beautiful films ever made.”
– David Jenkins, Time Out

“Building perfection from chaos, Terrence Malick’s 1978 masterpiece is more than the last cinematic word in aching pictorial romanticism—it’s practically an act of magic.”
– Bilge Ebiri, Time Out