Knight of Cups (2015) Reviews

• Long & vacuous

  nickle1012015-09-14

  Beautiful shots, lots of them. 2 hours of perfume ads, with an unhappy protagonist, Christian Bale. He is apparently a successful, but definitely miserable, comedy script writer; unintended irony I guess. He doesn't do anything, other than feature in most shots, often bare foot, speaking monotone about the difficulties of 'being', occasionally swimming in his clothes in swimming pools and the sea, often accompanied by women, one more beautiful than the other. The women, most of them, wearing flimsy designer attire, dance and wave their arms about for no apparent reason. The most exciting bit was the 5 sec. shot of Christian Bale riding a skateboard.

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• A true poem

  luukvanriel2016-02-14

  I won't mislead anyone. This movie is a tough watch if you don't like movie as a form of art and poetry. This movie requires you to be open-minded, philosophically inclined and love good cinematography and music. Malick once again put me in a hypnotic state of trance while watching this film. He keeps on going against conventional movie making. His style is hypnotic and gorgeous. What I took away after and while watching this movie is that it is a observational piece on human behavior. It made me realize how crazy the human race is. The way we enjoy entertainment, treat our women and live our lives. It's all a really surreal thing for a species to do. Apart from the plot, this movie is mesmerizing and extremely relaxing to watch. The soundtrack is trippy and hypnotic as always and Malick is really settling on a certain (like it or hate it) style of filmmaking. It's very personal whether you like his films or not. To me personally his films are wonderful observational pieces of art that should be stored and preserver for future generations to reflect upon. His films are also really great material to watch when you're high on psychedelics ;)

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• A surreal look into a man's crumbling world

  Lubezki2016-01-01

  Let's get one thing straight; Terrence Malick's films aren't exactly everyone's cup of tea. They're arguably the most unconventionally crafted movies from a well renowned director out there. Audiences normally criticize him for being highly pretentious and having no meaning in his work. But for some, his films represent everything we love about the artistic medium of motion pictures. With his latest offering, "Knight of Cups", Christian Bale stars as a screenwriter eager to explore his seedy persona in the dreamlike whereabouts of LA. The film swoons along with a plethora of illusory montages, with Bale being Malick's primary focus as he trudges through the streets of downtown L.A., bizarre nightclubs swarming with vibrant dancers, house parties exclusively for the rich and meditative walks through the desolate wastelands of the Las Vegas desert. For the majority of the film he cuts a forlorn figure, basically looking to find some sort of significance of his life and finding the answer to faith. And in typical Malick fashion, none of what we see on screen is straightforward and we're left to determine our own meaning on the gorgeously composed images. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki once again has a vice like grip on how to bring an ethereal visual lyricism to surroundings. Malick is one the very few directors who really embraces the beauty of artistic filmmaking. They may not follow a clear cut narrative, but there's no doubting that there's an alluring poetic rhythm that's present in his films. The key is for the viewer to figure out what Malick is attempting to portray. And even if you can't, just go along for the experience. Simply put, if you enjoy his films, you'll most likely find some sort of reward with this.

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• Sein and Dasein

  diand_2015-02-17

  Recently Peter Greenaway confessed he almost never saw a movie because there was no development to the form, still being a staged play, with actors doing their lines before the camera: just painting by numbers. Malick is one of the few that do not fit that description of the current state of the art, the others being directors like Tarkovsky, Kar-Wai and to a lesser extent Kubrick. In Knight of Cups all of Malick's trademarks are present: Rapid intersection of images, hiding of the story in the imagery, perfection in editing and the stream of consciousness-technique where thoughts and feelings are woven in voice-over with narrative. Knight of Cups has many autobiographical elements like The Tree of Life (loss of a brother) and To The Wonder (loss of relationships) already had: A son reflects on the essence of life, on his problematic ambiguous relationship with his father (recently deceased, one chapter in the movie is called Death) and on his relation with his surviving philanthropic brother (also deceased). Then there is the stream of women passing through his life and his feelings of lack of fulfillment. Strongly biblical in nature, questions of guilt and forgiveness pass on throughout, the movie being Malick's therapeutic instrument for reflection on his own life. It invites the audience to deconstruct the images, working as a kind of reversed post-modernism. It blurs the line between real and imagination, combined with the images it works almost hypnotically. There is a strong comparison here to Tarkovsky's autobiographical Zerkalo / Mirror, where the story itself was simple, but the container was rich and complex as only film can be. (There is the famous story of the cleaning lady (check it out on IMDb) who explained this Tarkovsky movie in one sentence to all critics still baffled by its meaning and trying to make sense of it all). There are so many great elements in Knight of Cups only a few can be stipulated here: • Comparing deep personal problems to the largest possible context, for example shots of the atmosphere going over in shots of Rick's convertible. • Humanity finding his true salvation in nature, frequently a scene ends with a shot of rock formations (or the famous moving stones) in the desert, suggesting time, eternity and acceptance. • Christian symbolism: A whole scene in Las Vegas ends with a statue of an angel. Imagewise, it is his most accomplished movie: amazing shots of both nature and culture intersecting in a way that keeps haunting you; Lubezki's cinematography and Fisk's production design here at the height of their possibilities. One example: The allure of female beauty is brought to the screen so beautiful and intelligent it results in striking image after striking image: shoes, bodies, masks, ads. It is very interesting to compare the vision on humanity Kubrick, Herzog, Mann and Malick have: Where Kubrick was the Sartre of filmmaking being pessimistic about the existence of man; Herzog sees nature and human culture as strictly separate entities where humanity should not venture. In Mann's world, humanity has lost its emotions, being captured in its own Foucauldian technological prisons. Malick however sees humanity in disarray with nature and part of salvation lies in the resolution of that misalliance. It can also be said that Malick's work is the visual equivalent of the writings of Heidegger, Malick being the translator of Das Wesen der Grundes / The Essence of Reasons. In Knight of Cups we see an inquiry into Sein (Being) through a person for whom Sein is a question (Dasein). Experience can only be described from the viewpoint of this Dasein. A voice without a voice, coming from conscience, calls Man back in self-awareness and fulfillment (back in Eigentlichkeit from Uneigentlichkeit) meanwhile answering questions about his own existence. This won nothing in Berlin with all prizes going to minor, uninteresting filmmakers. I think it would also be difficult for Aronofsky to admit his own filmmaking limitations. Although it will likely receive little peer-to-peer or critical appraisal, it brings the art of film to a higher level, earning a place in film history considerable time from now: nonsensical to many, life altering for some.

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• A trip

  benmichael-63332016-01-14

  As we grow more and more tired of dull as dishwater, predictable, structure obsessed nonsense, we come to love films that want to use the medium to take us on a trip. I see nothing wrong with enjoying beautiful imagery, stunning music and a bit of emotional self analysis for a couple of hours. Or would you rather the story by numbers of say, Joy? I may not have loved this as much as Thin Red Line, or Tree of Life, But am I happy to spend two hours with Mr. M? Indeed I am. Anyone who has led anything verging on an interesting life will have plenty to ponder as this washes over them. This was like meditating. It's freeing to let a sense of the story wash over you without having some contrived plot shoved down your throat. I let the cinema invigorated and cleansed.

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