To The Wonder Reviews
Top CriticThe movie plays like an undercooked pie that hasn't had enough time to cool and settle.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Essentially it's an agglomeration of Malick's worst stylistic annoyances.
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| Original Score: C-
We should not be exiting a Terrence Malick movie with a shrug, but there it is.
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| Original Score: 1.5/5
Chary of exposition, meagre of plot, derisory of dialogue, indifferent to comprehension, it's a project that veers perilously close to self-parody.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Mostly, it's solemn intonations of bad poetry over open-field twirling scenes and long serious looks of love, tenderness and cosmic understanding.
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| Original Score: D
"To the Wonder" is a trailer for itself, although it could be mistaken for a high-end perfume commercial ...
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
There's a little too much wonder and not quite enough story in this middling effort from Terrence Malick.
"To the Wonder" finds Malick pursuing a form of visual storytelling that is closer to chamber music, or symphonic rapture, than conventional film narrative.
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| Original Score: 3/4
To the Wonder suggests the creep of doubt and possibly even despair into Malick's cosmic questing. This may not be as profound as he intends - to be human is to forever question - but it makes for stimulating viewing.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The individually ravishing but loosely bound shots reduce whatever weight the story might have to the trivial narcissism of Caribbean-travel commercials.
There are moments of pure poetry in the movie but the production as a whole seems overlong and repetitive and takes a detour or two that distract from the aching beauty of the central story.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
There's little doubt this film will deepen, open up with a second viewing. But to what end?
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It serves up real emotion, and striking grace. It has moments of simple beauty, and thorny questions.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The cinematography here is enough to make you swoon. Would that the story were equally compelling.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
There is no new ground, really, the distinction is in the way Malick covers it with glorious imagery, symphonies of sound, a cacophony of moods.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The enigmatic spell of enchantment it casts is a work of complex artistry, and the sneering reviews say more about the critics, I am afraid, than about the film or its director.
The film breaks faith with its audience by asking us to care about two profoundly antipathetic characters spouting pseudo-poetic banalities.
Never was a film so visually stunning and so intolerable as To the Wonder.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
I didn't like the movie at all-found it boring, unintentionally comical, at times even (a word I seldom use) pretentious ...
Pretty but inert, To the Wonder is a vaporous mystery wrapped in a gauzy enigma - a cinematic riddle that'll appeal principally to those eager for another piece, however tiny, of the puzzle that is Terrence Malick.
A meditation on love and lost paradise that starts with breathtaking assurance and slowly crumbles into self-parody.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A film of simple themes, minimal dialogue and eloquent imagery.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
"It's like watching grass grow" isn't really a riposte to the stately, placid, dreamlike "To the Wonder." You might as well complain that Quentin Tarantino films are violent.
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| Original Score: 3/4
[Malick's] insistence on finding a cinematic idiom that connects beauty to ultimate truth is noble and sincere. But the fine intentions of "To the Wonder" pave a road to puzzlement, not awe.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Film genius to miss the mark. Case in point: Terrence Malick's To the Wonder, a beautifully empty exercise that - so glacial is the pace - makes Malick's Tree of Life look like G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The film's style is ethereal and incantatory, with a soundtrack woven out of whispers and classical music; if anything, it makes Malick's The Tree of Life look like a Noël Coward play.
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| Original Score: B-
Years seem to pass between scenes. To be honest, years seem to pass during scenes.
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| Original Score: 0/4
[Many will] be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
To the Wonder is arty for sure, but for the first time, its maker is working with anxieties we all feel. Let's hope this Malick sticks around for a while.
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| Original Score: 4/5
To the Wonder might be more experimental, but it's still all Malick, a filmmaker who can't see the forest for the craftsmanship.
Flaws and all, this is ravishing, distrib-worthy work from a filmmaker who hasn't lost his capacity to move and surprise.
To the Wonder feels like generalized woo-woo -- and self-parody.
There's a phoniness to the film's people and places that keeps us at a fatal distance from the big ideas with which 'To the Wonder' seeks to engage us.
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| Original Score: 2/5
There's nothing to "get." There really isn't. It's a story about a troubled relationship that, for me, ultimately chokes on its own self-conscious flourishes.
I recommend it for anyone who'll get a buzz out of hearing a line like "what is this love that loves us?" spoken in French.
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| Original Score: B-
A ramble through the ecstasies of the natural world as experienced or ignored by little people on a giant, gorgeous planet.
However accomplished Malick's technique might be in some ways, this mostly comes off, especially in the laborious second hour, as visual doodling without focused thematic goals.
