Days of Heaven (Classic Tuesdays)

Terrence Malick’s second film, following Badlands, confirmed his status as an auteur and as an American visionary and cinematic poet. It is arguably his finest film. The many striking images are charged with emotion and meaning, and the Oscar-nominated score from Ennio Morricone is also one of his best. (Malick himself won the Best Director award for this film at 1979 Cannes Film Festival.) Having escaped from the horrors of the factory and iron-foundry life in 1915 Chicago, a none-year-old girl, together with her brother and his lover, rides the rails in search of an Edenic life out west on a farm in the Texas panhandle. But this is a changing America, and their own personal tragedy becomes a reflection of a larger transformation. Above all, this is beautiful cinema.

93% – Rotten Tomatoes

7.8 / 10 – IMDB

“”Days of Heaven” was never a huge hit, but it was such a departure and so deliberate an attempt to have the audience stirred by beauty that it felt calming and inspiring.”

“The heavenly feeling in the movie is not really there in what happens to the people. The plot is full of tragedy, loss and separation, and of a briefly glimpsed paradise that cannot sustain human shortcomings. But heaven is there in the light on the grass, in the romantic aura of a house and in a few people in a place where there is no one else.”