The New World

First written in the early '80s, Terrence Malick's fourth film in three decades is a trancelike take on the relationship of Native American princess Matoaka — better known by the nickname Pocahontas ("naughty one") — and English adventurer John Smith. Malick attempts to rehabilitate a story usually cloaked in cloying romanticism and disingenuous historical mythmaking, but reconceiving Pocahontas and Smith as symbols of the noble savage and the man tragically stunted by civilization's constraints isn't inherently truer than the legend. Malick's extensive use of poetic voice-over lends the film a disconcerting air of adolescent naivete. Virginia colony, 1607: British s...