Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
An impressionable teenage girl from a dead-end town and her older greaser boyfriend embark on a killing spree in the South Dakota badlands.
Terrence Malick's debut is a landmark of American cinema. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen deliver iconic, chillingly detached performances that define the film's unique tone. Nestor Almendros's cinematography of the South Dakota plains is breathtaking and poetic. The film's novelty is exceptional — its dreamlike, disaffected narration and romantic-outlaw aesthetic are wholly singular, influencing countless films since. The plot, while deliberately episodic and elliptical, can feel meandering, and the ending, though tonally consistent, doesn't deliver a powerful dramatic payoff so much as a quiet, ironic fade-out.