Critic Reviews

Do the undeniably Malick-derived qualities of The Better Angels work against it, or is the film all the more special for being, essentially, a bonus Malick picture? To be fair to Edwards, a lot about The Better Angels sets it apart from Malick.

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.

A lushly conceived, exhaustively realized debut feature that'd be pretty formidable stuff coming from a more practised filmmaker -- and derided in some quarters as a self-impressed knock-off.

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.

Sandburg’s "The Prairie Years" is a source behind The Better Angels, a gorgeous look at the raw, wooded Indiana of the early 1800s and a dreamy study of the boy Lincoln who was destined to leave it behind.

It’s a bit too spare and Malik-like for its own good. But the incessant voice-over, another Malick trademark, here makes the whole enterprise feel overheard, a story constructed from memory where the words are just ways of underlining what we would come to know about Lincoln the man based on Lincoln the boy.

The film succeeds in that it provides a more vivid sense of this sort of 19th century childhood -- and Lincoln’s youth in particular -- than most people would have had before.

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

Mr. Edwards has given his film a strong narrative spine — depicting years in the life of young Abraham Lincoln as his family suffers and strives to succeed in Indiana — with such committed actors bringing life to the tale that the audience can't help but be engaged even as the staid, stark visuals keep viewers at arm's length.

If you succumb to The Better Angels, the effect is like falling into a gorgeous photograph, but that also means the narrative in this arthouse film is oblique and sketchy.