A Hidden Life (2019)

The critic celebrates the film's rhapsodic portrayal of private moral resistance and an equal, soul-deep love story amid encroaching fascism, praising its emotional resonance and spiritual depth.

Malick has found the inspiration for his best picture in years with this sombre spiritual war epic about one man’s refusal to fight. It is a sober, truthful, powerfully unadorned portrait of an unpretentious martyr and his strong wife.

Malick is back on historical ground with the most engaged and urgent work in ages, rooting his style in moral reality and using history to pose relevant questions about evil leadership.

Malick returns to a well-ordered script for the true story of a conscientious objector, delivering a rhapsodic and prayerful work that is a justification of his late style and an act of worship.

The critic calls it Malick’s strongest film in nearly a decade and a return to form, a poem and polemic that embodies its subject’s pacifism. It singles out the forceful denunciation of the complicity of church and state amid the Austrian farmer’s conscientious objection.

The critic calls the film one of Malick’s finest and most demanding works, a nearly three-hour philosophical summation of his career that rewards close attention. It singles out the extraordinary attention paid to mundane physical details of work, nature, and daily life as the element that makes the story an epic.

The critic highlights Malick's sensuous historical reverie evoking a harmonious rural way of life destroyed by war, framing the story as a battle between good and evil through images of the physical and spiritual realms.

Malick is back with a spiritual WWII story that deserves to be held in the same regard as his finest work.

Malick returns with a shatteringly powerful story of faith in crisis that stands as his best film since The Tree of Life.

Malick confronts real darkness in this portrait of a wartime pacifist, bringing a spiritual dimension and resulting in his best film in years despite the familiar stylistic tics.

The critic praises the film's vivid immersion in ordinary existence, morality and conscience, noting its evocative cinematography and timely message that history pivots on unhistoric acts.

The critic calls it Malick's best film in years for its disciplined storytelling, urgent philosophising and raw power alongside signature visuals, while noting a slightly laboured Christ metaphor in the second half.

Malick takes on the evils of history in a more linear, philosophical mode that uses movement, wide-angle visuals, and everyday moments to convey one man's act of resistance and its personal cost.

The critic notes the film's urgent take on standing up to tyranny through a Christ-like martyr figure, admiring its melancholy reflection on the limits of individual righteousness while acknowledging its familiar Malick style.

The film is a lyrical but uneven pean to moral purity and one man's crisis of faith and country, pushing Malick's inquiry further even as its form occasionally verges on the monotonous.

Malick has found a subject worth getting close to in the true story of an Austrian farmer who refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler. The film bravely asks how one retains innocence in dark times, though it is guilty of incessant questioning.

The critic finds the film gorgeous and at times frustrating, praising its embrace of beauty while noting how the arguments and meaning of Franz’s defiance slide across overlapping scenes. It singles out the way the story examines the provocative refusal to swear loyalty to Hitler as both personal and philosophical.

The film offers a hagiographic portrait of unwavering moral certitude with little internal doubt or drama, relying instead on stunning scenery and repetitive visual affectations.

Three hours of soul-searching against breathtakingly cloud-enshrouded mountains yields treasures like rhythmic scythe movements and tender moments, but the figure of Franz has nothing to transcend and the film suffers from monotony.

Malick's high-minded hymn to a modern saint never quite comes to life despite its serious intent. The director's signature ecstatic style encloses the conscientious objector in a hermetically sealed environment of heightened awareness.

The film is a meditation on faith and belief in God in a lunatic world, centered on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter's conscientious objection. It limits its scope by focusing on one man's spiritual protest in an isolated village, barely addressing the Holocaust, which weakens its power compared to Malick's other political films.

Malick delivers an indulgent three-hour study of the conscientious objector that beautifies and flattens the material while avoiding deep exploration of the character's moral and religious inner life.

The critic finds the film aridly theoretical and impersonal, a giant stumbling into self-parody with grandiosity that overwhelms the story’s noble specificity. It singles out the illustrative, effortful imagery and Central Casting Nazis as elements that turn the resistance narrative into a vague, bombastic exercise.

The critic calls it a masterpiece and says Malick is back in top form with an inspiring story of resistance to Hitler and Nazi Germany. The film is praised for serving a strong narrative with its true tale of conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter.

The critic says Malick gets his mojo back with this World War II drama, anchored in story in a way his recent movies have not been. It is hailed as the director’s most monumental work since “The Tree of Life,” a luminous and substantial addition to his filmography.

The critic praises the film as Malick working at his peak, delivering a straightforward and spiritually rewarding meditation on God, morality, and steadfast conviction against fascism through rich visuals and a simple, compelling story.

The critic notes that the film proves Malick still has his mojo with gorgeous imagery and a more linear story about doing what is right, though it can feel somewhat shallow on subtext; the lead performances are compelling.

The critic finds the film beautiful yet overlong and confounding, stretching a thin narrative over three hours with repetitive imagery. They single out the pastoral beauty and composition for admiration while noting complications in its portrayal of Nazis and historical representation.

The critic finds the film repetitive and aimless despite its beautiful visuals, suggesting it could lose an hour to tighten the narrative, though the final section is more compelling. The screenplay gives little depth to the lead actors.