So still tied at #152, we come to this Terrence Malick movie. I don’t normally quote Wikipedia in my write-ups, but I’m going to do so here:

Days of Heaven received positive reviews on its original theatrical release. Its photography was widely praised, although a small number of critics considered only this aspect to be worthy of high praise. It was not a significant commercial success, but did win an Academy Award for Best Cinematography

Because yeah, that almost perfectly captures my sense. The movie takes place in a wheat farm in the middle of some great plains or other. (I guess it’s supposed to be Texas, but it was filmed in Canada, so I stand by my vague location description.) It is absolutely gorgeous. The lone farmhouse in the middle of the fields, the perpetual golden hour with the gently waving stalks, it’s just a really beautiful movie.

And… that’s all it is. The story of the movie is that Richard Gere murders a guy in a Chicago steel mill, and then is on the lam with his young sister and his girlfriend who is pretending to be his sister. They end up jumping on a train and then disembarking at a farm where they join up as farm laborers.

The movie is interesting here mostly as a look at what early mechanized farms were like. I’m not an expert on farm vehicles, but they clearly have some here, big hulking tractory things; but they don’t do as much as they do today, so they need a small army of people out there hauling wheat around and feeding it into hoppers or whatever else.

But what we’re supposed to care about is Richard Gere’s girlfriend, who (being nominally single — his sister, remember) is noticed by the sickly farmer who owns all these fields (and is therefore much richer than them). Seeing his interest, they get a little scam going; she marries him in furtherance of this plan, and you can just see that it’s all going to end in tragedy. Which, spoiler alert, it does.

The thing is, that plot is thin as heck. The movie is only 94 minutes, but it feels like it drags, as it steps through the obvious and obligatory story beats before ending where it has to. The acting is nothing special, there’s no great dialogue, it’s all just kinda there, except for the cinematography.

Apparently this movie has been recontextualized/reclaimed/whatever these days, and there’s a greater belief among critics that the movie is actually good all-around (which, y’know, nineteen critics thought it was one of the ten greatest movies ever in this poll). You can read this Roger Ebert review if you want to see what advocates of that perspective say; but for my part, I’m sticking with it being beautiful, but not more than that.

(Also, somewhat weirdly, this movie burned Malick out so hard that he didn’t make another movie for twenty years. I remember seeing The Thin Red Line in college and being confused about how this Malick guy that I’d never heard of was such a big deal, and I guess “we’ve been waiting two decades for a follow-up to his early, promising movies” — Badlands predates this one — explains it.)