Days of Heaven

Paramount Pictures | Release Date: September 13, 1978

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

94	METASCORE Universal acclaim based on 20 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

100

Robert Faires

Some movies are like Dorothy's twister; they just pick you up and whisk you away from the commonplace world you know to a world wondrous and astonishing. Days of Heaven is such a movie. [27 July 1998] Read full review

100

Roger Ebert

Above all one of the most beautiful films ever made. Malick's purpose is not to tell a story of melodrama, but one of loss. His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie. [7 Dec. 1997] Read full review

100

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

Director Malick endows this simple, timeless story with the enormous scope and resonance of myth through a clear vision unclouded by sentimentality and by a deft juxtaposition of image, music, and character. Read full review

100

Staff (Not Credited)

A dramatically moving and technically breathtaking American art film, one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1970s. Read full review

100

Michael Atkinson

It seems almost incontestably...the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. [23 March 1999] Read full review

100

Michael Wilmington

Days of Heaven is the grand climax of the whole "Bonnie and Clyde"-"Badlands" tradition of outlaw-lovers-on-the-run movies. Shot by Nestor Almendros and the uncredited Haskell Wexler, it's a cinematographic masterpiece. [20 March 1998]

100

Dave Kehr

The result is a film that hovers just beyond our grasp--mysterious, beautiful, and, very possibly, a masterpiece. Read full review

100

Bilge Ebiri

Among the greatest, most ravishing of films. Read full review

100

The GuardianPeter Bradshaw

The film, with its transcendentally beautiful visuals...is a rich and rewarding experience. [1 Sept. 2011] Read full review

100

Matthew Leyland

Largely lensed in the window between sunset and nightfall, it’s a magic-hour masterpiece. [26 Aug. 2011] Read full review

100

EmpireIan Nathan

Rarely has a film bared itself to simple majesty...it feels epic yet runs barely over and hour and a half. [22 Oct. 1997] Read full review

100

Nick Schager

To hell with equivocation or beating around the bush: Terrence Malick's 1978 Days of Heaven is the greatest film ever made. And let the word film be emphasized, since Malick's sophomore masterpiece earns this exalted designation from its position as a work of pure cinema. [22 Oct. 2007] Read full review

100

Edward Guthmann

Days of Heaven is a visual poem. Slow and elegant, reverential in the way it celebrates the earth's contours and the play of light. [27 Oct. 1999, p.B3]

100

Jack Kroll

Days of Heaven is a big advance, hauntingly beautiful in image, sound and rhythm, unashamedly poetic, brimming with sweetness and bitterness, darkness and light. [18 Sept. 1978, p.97]

100

Andrew Ross

The pictures — migrants leaping off a westbound train, a quick close-up of a face riven with conflicting emotions, locusts on a stalk of wheat — truly tell the story. [21 March 1997] Read full review

100

Keith Phipps

It's Malick's particular genius to make viewers feel like they're seeing the world, with all its beauty and danger, for the first time. [28 Nov. 2007] Read full review

Jay Scott

Days of Heaven is so unapologetically beautiful, so calculatingly gorgeous, it is certain to arouse resentment in the minds of those who find visual hedonism a sin in movies, and to arouse suspicion, if not outrage, in those who require that movies have heart. [22 Sept. 1978]

James Berardinelli

The film has too much surface beauty not to earn it a recommendation, but Days of Heaven satisfies only on a sensory level. Read full review