The Better Angels

Apart from the heavy debt it owes to Malick’s oeuvre, Edwards’ entrancing debut is radically non-generic, either as history film and coming-of-age piece.

To tell you the truth, The Better Angels, as pictorially beautiful and emotionally evocative as it is, is so bereft of conventional narrative momentum that you have to consider it a miracle it got made.

A movie that’s visually stunning and often poetic, but also leaves too much unsaid.

Directed by Terrence Malick's editor and protégé, A.J. Edwards, The Better Angels abounds with Malick-ian moments: upward-pointing cameras capturing bodies wheeling through fields, plaintive voice-overs punctuated by Jew's harp and birdsong, a tendency to drift toward the sky and its moody tableau of clouds.

In the absence of a more conventional storytelling approach, this series of brief, fragmented glimpses of the harsh challenges that shaped Lincoln's early life never allows you to get sufficiently close to its celebrated subject.

There’s slow cinema and there is boring cinema, and this is an unfortunate example of the latter.

Kruger and Clarke do their best to look steadfast with a camera swooping around them like a wounded bird, but there's no rescuing this imprecise family portrait from its own impulses toward obscurity.