excellent

Fascinating, interesting, original survey of Malick’s work as it connects to broader issues of philosophy and its possible relationship to film.

Overall, I appreciated this book immensely. Sinnerbrink is as readable a philosopher as I could hope to find writing about any filmmaker, especially Malick. I am very grateful for the ways he so clearly elucidates Malick's interactions with Kierkegaard in particular, as most writers have tended to dismiss Malick's later, Kierkegaardian films, focusing instead on his earlier Hegelian oeuvre. (I couldn't pass up the opportunity to write "Hegelian oeuvre," now could I?)

Regarding those later films, I think Sinnerbrink missteps when he collects To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song into a cohesive trilogy that does not include The Tree of Life and Voyage of Time. This categorization prompts him to define the three films as all dealing with questions of "love" primarily, rather than love as an aspect of a larger concern about "meaning." There are, admittedly, many influences to Malick's films, but disregarding their biblical antecedents—the Wisdom literature, Job, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs—invariably means doing extra, unnecessary work to make the films cohere. Like most philosophers, Sinnerbrink is averse to the overt Christian aspects of Malick's later films. He is as welcoming of those aspects as I could ever imagine a secular philosopher being, but he is still embarrassed by them.

Again, I am enormously grateful for all Sinnerbrink does here, and I am in awe of how lucid it is. I would absolutely assign this text in a graduate level course on Malick. That it lacks the biblical underpinnings is a fault of the Theology and Film crowd, a fault I intend to correct one of these days.