Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 168: Sun Jun 18

The New World (Malick, 2005): Picturehouse Central, 1pm

Picturehouse introduction:
2017 sees the 400th year anniversary of the death of Pocahontas, who died in Gravesend in 1617. To mark this anniversary, Border Crossings’ ORIGINS Festival screens one of the greatest films of the 21st Century – Terrence Malick’s THE NEW WORLD. It is a film of astounding elemental beauty, which re-imagines the meeting between Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Powhatan princess Pocahontas (in a revelatory performance by Q’orianka Kilcher,) as a romantic idyll between spiritual equals. The action then follows Pocahontas as she marries John Rolfe (Christian Bale) and travels to England. Followed by a Q&A with Dakota Sioux historian Stephanie Pratt.

The film is being screened in 35mm.

Here is the Guardian's John Patterson who hailed the film the best of the last decade – and by some way. This is his article from December in full and here is an extract:
'It may seem like an exaggeration, but with The New World cinema has reached its culmination, its apotheosis. It is both ancient and modern, cinema at its purest and most organic, its simplest and most refined, made with much the same tools as were available in the infancy of the form a century ago to the Lumières, to Griffith and Murnau. Barring a few adjustments for modernity – colour, sound, developments in editing, a hyper-cine-literate audience – it could conceivably have been made 80 years ago (like Murnau and Flaherty's Tabu). This is why, I believe, when all the middlebrow  Oscar-dross of our time has eroded away to its constituent molecules of celluloid, The New World will stand tall, isolated and magnificent, like Kubrick's black monolith.'

Here is the opening.