I would like to get back the time wasted watching this poor movie. Mr. Bale...can you smile? Mr. Bale...can you look pensive? Mr. Bale can you spin and touch peoples faces? PLEASE! All the nudity was gratuitous; it was simply there for voyeuristic attempts to keep someone watching. All those involved in attempting to make an art film failed. It goes nowhere with an overlong running time of nothingness. The only thing of value was the nature photography.

I could write a novel about this film. For quite some time I was thinking how to write short review and not miss the essence. Mass bashing of this movie does not speak so much about its quality as it speaks about today's audience. World got faster, people have no time, they're impatient and nervous, and even worse, they're addicted to adrenaline injections served by modern big and home screens. Unfortunately, this movie is not for everyone. It's not for most of people. But if you are willing to relax, open yourselves emotionally and let the moment carry you, this film could be enriching experience. They say it's pretentious, boring and has no story. True, it's not perfect, it has pretentious and even boring moments and it is very tiring watch if you are not capable to let go. Fact that it does not have plot doers not mean it has no story. It has story, and what a story it has, it just does not tell it in conventional ways. It tells the story by picture and sound and emotion. Every cadre is like a postcard, every sound contributes to artistic photography. This is one of those movies that are not supposed to be analyzed, but felt. I never saw any Terrence Malick movies till now, and if this one really is his worst then I definitely must watch all the rest.8,5/10P.S. For those incapable to enjoy artistic movie, if nothing else, two hours of Christian Bale surrounded with many gorgeous women should be enough reason to at least try.Hungry. Longing for something without knowing what it is.Treat this world as it deserves. There are no principles... just circumstances.You think when you reach certain age things will start making sense. Then you find out you're as lost as you were before. I suppose that's what damnation is. The pieces of your life never to come together. Just splashed out there.So much I was given. So much I left behind.Real life's so hard to find. Where it is? How do you get there?Pay attention to this moment. And everything is there... perfect and complete just as it is.There's so much love inside us that never gets out.

(Flash Review)Malick is one director who makes art from film and one of my current favorites. Much like a semi-abstract piece of modern art, his films are organic in many ways and open to the viewer's interpretation. The stories are told more through visuals than dialog. And for me they are shot in such a compelling way that they stick with me even if I'm confused. Like modern art, it may take repeat viewings or reflection after the credits roll to 'get it'. Knight of Cups is filled with bold imagery and edits, jarring at times but they all give a sense of atmosphere. This film 'appears' to be about a man who has lost his brother and like his father is trying to cope with the tragedy. He is also a Hollywood writer and is in the glamorous scene. He is searching for a new direction for his life and to be able to feel emotion again; probably muted from the loss of his brother. The film editing is filled with a collage of glamorous imagery contrasted with calm nature atmospheric shots and what dialog there is is mainly told through narration. Not for everyone but the viewer needs to interpret the fantastic imagery to make something of the plot.

Some random thoughts while watching this pretentious stinker: Film students correctly screen and study the works of Fellini and Antonioni and so did Malick, but ripping them off is inadvisable.I saw "Badlands" at its NYFF world preem in 1973 and was a big fan of TM through his next one "Days of Heaven", but....he ended up a hack as witness here.Compare careers to Conrad Rooks -as fiercely independent minded if not more so with 2 interesting features to his credit "Chappaqua", plus Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha". No idiot Malick Kool Aid drinking producers to back further follies for him, however.Key ripoff: the great Scandi filmmaker Peter Watkins who invented the "You are There" first-person camera filmmaking technique for fictional, historical subject matter - wildly overdone by Malick with wide angle distortion added.Ultimate indie pioneer John Cassavetes used improvisation for rehearsals and prep to invent a unique filming style; Malick uses improvisation as a lazy self-indulgence.Film Festival-itis: making movies to be "consumed" on the antiquated, dating back to the '30s and '40s of Venice and Cannnes, international film festival as exhibition venue circuit, pandering to the gatekeepers of same: selection committees and junket-style critics, as witness the empty "eroticism" (not) thrown in as chief fetish of a "festival junkie".Brain-dead stars: many a big name attracted to this no-script, no- nothing project in order to boast "I worked with Terrence Malick" and then spout gibberish in the inevitable BTS bonus interviews on DVD.Film School Error 101: The Shot: when I first became a film buff over 5 decades ago I was fascinated with the "striking shot", a Bertolucci or for that matter Antonioni composition or moving camera that stuck out - the opposite of crafting a real, functioning feature film where both camera-work and editing (and SPFX especially) are ideally invisible once a filmmaker has matured. It's not the shot (battle) that counts, it's the film (war).Antonioni, not Clapton or Kilroy, is God syndrome: not just the ending but the endless expanses of emptiness, as mentioned by loyal production designer Jack Fisk, not symbolic but merely undigested Antonioni imitation, see: "La Notte".Elephantiasis: in the '60s I watched hundreds if not thousands of experimental film short subjects, screened at Midnight every Saturday and Sunday night at the local art theaters back in Cleveland, drawn from Ann Arbor and other regional festivals. Very educational and formative for a young film buff, with Stan Brakhage, George Kuchar and Ed Emshwiller raised to a pedestal for me. I'm sure Malick did too, but his big-budget feature-length imitations of same are embarrassing and a slap in the face of the many progenitors of the "underground movement" ranging from Maya Deren to even the '60s future pornographers -the Findlays. But he gets away with it, as current viewers and critics have no grounding in film history.The Fellini scenes: TM couldn't resist "throwing a party" just like Fellini, but the maestro's parties have life and invention, while here we see clichéd Hollywood types milling about, over-wrangled by some anonymous assistant director, completely artificial in their groupings and movements.Lastly, Bale as empty as the project. He gives new meaning to the derisive term "walk-through". And this is after, like the other hapless cast members, being given free rein by an absentee "director".