Master delivers epic beauty

You will not see a more beautiful film this year than this one by Terrence Malick, who makes movies so rarely. Watch the silent opening as three British ships arrive on the coast of Virginia in 1607 to search for treasure, and both eye and mind are charged with the visual imagination of a master.

Watch the ending, as Pocahontas, the young native woman with whom two of the men fall in love, dies in Gravesend after marrying one of them, and a similar feeling of something exceptional is generated.

It helps, of course, that there's Wagner and Mozart on the soundtrack, rather than some piece of Hollywood musical gunge. It also helps that Malick has found, for his Pocahontas, a 15-year-old actress called Q'orianka Kilcher whose beauty is matched by a performance of stunning naturalness. The third benison for audiences is the accurate detail of the production. Nothing seems fake and everything real.

But if this is a film you should definitely see - especially now Malick has cut at least 15 minutes out of the first version, rendering its stately pace more digestible - be warned that the film-maker's visual flair and imagination are still not equalled by his narrative skill.

There are frequent longueurs as we watch first Captain Smith (Colin Farrell) and then John Rolfe (Christian Bale) fall for Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief Powhatan. But the story is fascinating enough to forgive them, culled as it is from history and distorted far less than Hollywood would have allowed if it weren't for Malick's insistent artistic integrity.

It's all traversed with great sensitivity and a feeling for both the settlers and the native Americans which is admirably without either malice or melodrama. The two sides never understand each other but at least attempt to discover each other's secrets.

A cherishable artist is at work here, who believes that humanity, civilised or not, warts and all, is worth more than some cynics would have us believe.

The New World
Cert: 12A