Best of the Decade #2: The New World

Perhaps more than any other film on this list, The New World reminds us of the poetry inherent in the realistic, unvarnished image, and by extension, the poetry found at the intersection of history and lore. The film literally opens with an invocation (here, to Mother Earth, but it might as well be to cinema), a welcoming invitation into Malick’s gently rigorous ongoing meditation on humanity. The backdrop of the natural has played a role in all of his features this far, but in this telling of our nation’s birth story, he’d found the perfect setting for his major concern: man’s relation to nature.