american dreams; Terrence Malick envisions our country's beginnings, while Lars von Trier conjures up a nightmare South.(The New World)(Manderlay)(Movie Review)

One of the most ambitious Hollywood movies in years, Terrence Malick's love-or-hate-it The New World offers nothing less than an origin myth of America. Colin Farrell stars as Captain John Smith, an ardent but unreliable adventurer who falls passionately in love with Pocahontas (newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher), a plump-lipped, bare-flanked tribal princess who embodies all the promise of the New World itself. But this is just the movie's starting point-Pocahontas also has another suitor in a gentle tobacco planter played by Christian Bale. Malick uses her two romances to explore eternal conflicts between nature and history, innocence and experience, utopian ardor and sensible compromise.

Ever since Badlands 32 years ago, Malick has been celebrated for his ability to create dreamlike worlds. This new movie is sometimes rapturously beautiful, and it forever changes how we imagine the past-from the colonists' landing on these native shores to the spectacular facial decorations of the Native Americans. Malick's metaphysical ruminations do produce some dull patches early on, and his attempt to evoke pure goodness-always the hardest thing to show-sometimes veers toward the trite, if not the kitschy. But no matter. Moving from the luxuriant long grasses of the American wilderness to the palaces of ...