The Thin Red Line
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation | Release Date: January 8, 1999 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
78
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 32 Critic Reviews
Positive:
29
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
78
Austin ChronicleMarjorie Baumgarten
Despite this film's narrative lapses, Malick has a unique way of distilling the poetry from the commonplace -- and for that precious gift we should say amen. Read full review
80
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
This may have its occasional dull stretches, but in contrast to "Saving Private Ryan" it's the work of a grown-up with something to say about the meaning and consequences of war. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
The movie's schizophrenia keeps it from greatness (this film has no firm idea of what it is about), but doesn't make it bad. It is, in fact, sort of fascinating: a film in the act of becoming, a field trial, an experiment in which a dreamy poet meditates on stark reality. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael Wilmington
One of the most curious and perversely brilliant films ever made in the American studio system. It's a shining example of qualities we don't normally see in our big theatrical pictures: vast ambition, huge resources and technical genius mated to a unique and compelling vision of life. Read full review
75
Christian Science MonitorDavid Sterritt
Although the story seems disjointed at times, no other war movie has tried so valiantly to convey not only the suffering of combat but the awful fissures it leaves between humanity's ideal oneness with itself and the world we live in. Read full review
70
Dallas ObserverAndy Klein
What Malick has fashioned here is less a conventional narrative than an impressionistic mosaic of our common, yet varied experience of life and death, as focused and clarified through the relentless lens of war. Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
An epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract. Read full review
80
Film.comNorman Green
The Thin Red Line attempts to soar much nearer to the sun than "Ryan." Its imagery aims at our souls. It wrestles with complexity, speaks to us in poetry, weaves multiple narrative strands into a tapestry, opens the festering wounds of war and gazes inside without blinking.
80
Film.comPeter Brunette
I was so taken by the film's sublime visual poetry, its telling silences, its finely orchestrated editing rhythms.
90
Film.comTom Keogh
Misshapen but magnificent vision of a soulful quest -- in the thick of misery and fear -- for the meaning of our lives.
90
Film.comJohn Hartl
Could be called the "Red Badge of Courage" of World War II movies. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
An art film to the core. If it's an epic, it's an intimate, dream-time epic, an elliptical, episodic film, dependent on images and reveries, that treats war as the ultimate nightmare, the one you just cannot awaken from no matter how hard you try. Read full review
90
Mr. ShowbizRichard T. Jameson
It's the awesome, metaphysically charged spectacle of man doing terrible things to man within the multicolored and multifarious cathedral of Nature. Read full review
100
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
Here is something great and startling -- not necessarily the kind of comforting, consensus-creating film that wins Oscars, but unquestionably a movie that will live in the history of the medium. Read full review
80
NewsweekDavid Ansen
Juxtaposes beauty and horror to fashion a savage and lyrical cinematic poem. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
The director is a poet of images. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
Unique and courageous. It may be counted as one of the year's few steps forward in cinema. Read full review
63
San Francisco ExaminerEdvins Beitiks
Powerful war spectacle neglects novel's heart and much of story. Read full review
80
SlateDavid Edelstein
No movie in the last decade has succeeded in psyching out critics and audiences as fully as the powerful, rambling war epic The Thin Red Line. Read full review
90
The A.V. ClubScott Tobias
Malick's powerful intermingling of brutality and beauty, his signature cutaways to indigenous flora and fauna, and the gentle lyricism of his disjunctive narration and painterly images are too rich to fully register in a single viewing. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
Like no other war movie you've ever seen. Read full review
70
The New York TimesJanet Maslin
One more film that could have been helped by excising repetition and focusing performances, but it wanders almost randomly instead. The heart-piercing moments that punctuate its rambling are glimpses of what a tighter film might have been. Read full review
90
TimeRichard Corliss
The film is a gorgeous garland on an unknown soldier's grave. Read full review
100
TNT RoughCutGraham Verdon
This just may be the greatest war movie ever made.
80
TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh
An intensely internalized portrait of external pandemonium, a slippery, insidiously haunting work of poetry rather than brilliantly realized pulp. Read full review
80
VarietyTodd McCarthy
Like a Rousseau painting splattered with carnage of warfare. Read full review
90
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
As mystical as it is gritty, as despairing as it is detached. Read full review
90
Washington PostMichael O'Sullivan
The disturbing ideas it plants in the soil of the soul need time and darkness ? not light ? to germinate. Read full review
70
Washington PostStephen Hunter
A big, fat, gorgeous, mesmerizing mess. Read full review
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