Free Republic

The reclusive director of the crucially acclaimed movie 'The Tree of Life' shows signs of taking a new, even more explicitly Christian direction. “What does Christ want from us?” According to Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick posed this question to his fellow director in a letter after seeing Silence, the former’s long-awaited film about Jesuit missionaries in Japan. Malick’s cinematic corpus has been marked by Christian themes, music, and imagery from the beginning. For example, those watching the fire scene from Badlands (1973) with the English captions on will see the following lyrics from German composer Carl Orff’s choral piece “Passion”:...

When Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) glances skyward and calls for God to show him a sign, to guide him, what does he hear? The rumbling of a thunderstorm hovering atop the Alps surrounding his bucolic hometown of St Radegund; the sound of the wind caressing the wheat fields around the village; the voice of his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner) and their three little girls. And then, once World War II breaks out and jettisons him in a dim-light world of military prisons and court tribunals, it’s the sound of broken limbs and bodies thudding on floors; the echo...

Michael Cimino died last weekend. If you recognize his name at all, it's probably because you remember that he was the guy who won the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Deer Hunter in 1979. Cimino directed just seven feature films in 42 years—a pace that makes Terrence Malick look like a workhorse. But he was so much more than just a lazy director. He was one of the great American hucksters.