Days of Heaven

The vibes of this delirious, slow and slightly meandering movie are unmatched. I urge you to watch it just for the visuals, the theory of mind that made it, and the slice of a very different moment in film.

If I were teaching a film editing class, I would ask students to recut it into a more suspenseful, coherent narrative. Because there is one in the many long, artful compositions. But for me, I don't need to care about the plot to love the experience of watching this. Does it make sense? Not really. Does that matter? Not really.

Days of Heaven brings you to an imagined frontier within the heightened past of the 1970s. The costumes, sets, actors, everything looks so carefully composed as to feel modern. The stuff of art directors from every era since.

Go on, open a container of whatever stuff you enjoy, and spend some time remembering when movies had no need to tell you what to feel. They just let you experience beauty and wonder. This one begs the question, in our time of simple narratives and constant calls to action, of how this ever got made to begin with.