Leading Ladies: January 2006

The New World

Stars: Colin Farrell, Q'Orianka Kilcher, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale
Director: Terrence Malick
Rating: PG-13

Though historians may not concur about all aspects of the story of Pocahontas and her relationships with John Smith and John Rolfe or how they affected the settlement of Jamestown, the Leading Ladies do agree (unanimously so) that director Malick's big-screen imagining of the stories is fresh, provocative and beautiful.

The Los Angeles Times's Carina Chocano calls the movie "a work of breathtaking imagination, less a movie than a mode of transport, and in every sense a masterpiece," while the New York Daily News's Jami Bernard says, "In the end, it's a sweeping, important film that overturns everything you learned in school about the birth of this nation."

Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum says, "[No one] can match Malick's touch for shuffling a deck of elegiac images (water/sky/clouds/rain) and fanning out the hand to express what speech cannot; he's a master, too, of incorporating sound that is often wordless but never empty."

The New York Times's Manohla Dargis says, "The pop Pocahontas who later emerged in song and cartoons is a comfortable fiction, at least for a country eager to tell its story in the best possible light... In [Malick's] telling, Pocahontas is a woman whose story has the reach of myth and the tragic dimension of life." And TV Guide's Maitland McDonagh says female lead Kilcher, who was 14 years old when the movie was filmed, "brings an impressive gravity to her portrayal of a once-willful girl reduced to a ghost drifting through some strange facsimile of life."

Female consensus: It's a brave New World

next : Tristan & Isolde