Badlands - Movie Reviews (2024)

Some movies are so good that when they’re over, you almost expect the whole film industry to shut down.

Full Review | Dec 5, 2023

It’s a well written tale of two lost souls dancing between idyllic naiveté and sociopathic violence. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 19, 2022

I didn't completely dislike the film. I was mostly just bored by it, which is often my criticism of Malick's films.

Full Review | Apr 1, 2021

The film is admirable visually, verbally, psychologically. It took guts for a neophyte film maker still in his twenties to fire two cinematographers before a third gave him what he wanted; yet the result is seamlessly impeccable.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2020

Terrence Malick's amazing debut feature, Badlands, which basically made the careers of everyone whose name was attached to it.

Full Review | Jul 1, 2020

It signals the directorial debut of what appears to be a knowledgeable, almost classically precise, important young filmmaker, Terrence Malick.

Full Review | Dec 16, 2019

Everyone concerned with Badlands has my admiration -- Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek... Warren Oates as her father; and all of the less familiar actors but most of all, Terrence Malick, who wrote and directed Badlands. It is clearly his triumph.

Full Review | Oct 28, 2019

Angry young white men.

Full Review | Aug 19, 2019

Malick's love and respect for the natural world as it frames and moves characters is palpable and on full display, the film heightened by superb performances and Malick's incredible direction.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2019

A masterly exercise in ironic narration, and of a director so wholly in command of the rhetoric of his medium.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 10, 2018

If a portion of American cinema is going to remain devoted to violence, it could learn a lot by revisiting Malick's thoughtfulness.

Full Review | Feb 21, 2018

[VIDEO ESSAY] Terrence Malick's self-penned feature debut is a haunting road movie pitched in '50s Americana. The film's razor-sharp tone of poetic irony is unique.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Apr 1, 2014

The movie is just as free, experimental, and unsure of itself as its main characters are, and thus fits like a glove.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 21, 2014

This tender treatment does nothing to alleviate the horror of the atrocities committed.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | May 22, 2013

In the fall of 1973, one could see signposts of cinema's future in Mean Streets and The Exorcist, yet with this youthful pair of proto-indie dreamers, Malick was paving a whole new road. It turned out to be the path most traveled.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 7, 2013

It's a testament to Bruce Greenwood's acting that Adan never becomes entirely as insufferable as the words that come out of his mouth.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | May 5, 2013

One of Malick's most resonant notions in Badlands is that everyone confronts mortality in his or her own way.

Full Review | Oct 14, 2011

Malick has come to be known and revered as a cinematic poet and philosopher, as a filmmaker who explores big ideas, but in Badlands in particular he also shows a knack for off-kilter humor.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Aug 9, 2011

In his debut, Terrence Malick is an uncanny creator of pearlescent forms, a very stark balladeer, Mark Twain's coolly ferocious heir

Full Review | Jun 27, 2011

Incredibly beautiful, of course (you may have heard that Malick movies are famous for their landscapes), but it's not "just" beautiful.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | May 31, 2011