Life will repeatedly wound you, and profoundly disappoint you by the time you’re 13 or 14…jobs will disappear, lovers will leave you, pets will die, leaves will turn yellow and brown and fall from the trees so what the fuck? “There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.” — Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls. But you know what’s almost never “true,” or at least in the way Hemingway and other considerable persons have defined the term over the millenia? Fucking Twitter.

“Any honest person who’s kept up with Malick since his return to filmmaking in 1998 (and who has contemplated the three Malick films shot by Emannuel Lubezki — The New World, The Tree of Life and To The Wonder) would have to admit that Malick has all but destroyed his once-potent mystique because he’s placed too much emphasis on the purely visual. He doesn’t give enough consideration to script and dialogue matters, and seems to have more or less abandoned conventional narrative. This plus his now-customary prolonged fiddle-faddling in post-production has fed a growing notion that Malick is a gifted but flaky eccentric — i.e., Mr. Wackadoodle.” — posted in December 2013.

“Those who have had their fill of Terrence Malick‘s impressionistic musings will find Knight of Cops as empty as the lifestyle it puts on display.” With his latest film, in post-production for the better part of two years and just press-screened in Berlin this morning (i.e., early last February), Malick “has settled into a deeply personal vein that all but his staunchest admirers may find wanting compared with his celebrated earlier work. To see our 21st-century reality from Malick’s exalted perspective (mediated once again by the superb eye of d.p. Emmanuel Lubezki) is to feel at once astonished and mildly deflated.” — from Justin Chang‘s 2.8.15 Berlin Film Festival review.