[2] He then directed the World War II epic The Thin Red Line (1998), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, the historical romantic drama The New World (2005), and the experimental coming-of-age drama The Tree of Life (2011), for which he was again nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or.

Malick's style has polarized scholars and audiences; many praise his films for their lavish cinematography and aesthetics, but others fault them for lacking plot and character development.

[15][16] Malick graduated from Harvard College in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

[17] In 1969, Northwestern University Press published Malick's translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons.

Malick's first feature-length work as a director was Badlands, an independent film starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as a young couple on a crime spree in the 1950s Midwest.

[20] Malick raised half the budget by approaching people outside of the industry, including doctors and dentists, and by contributing $25,000 from his personal savings.

[21][22] After a troubled production that included many crew members leaving halfway through, Badlands drew raves upon its premiere at the New York Film Festival.

[23] Malick's second film was the Paramount-produced Days of Heaven, about a love triangle that develops in the farm country of the Texas Panhandle in the early 20th century.

[28][29] In The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg wrote that it "is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film.

[32] Following the release of Days of Heaven, Malick began developing a project for Paramount, titled Q, that explored the origins of life on earth.

[33] During this time, he wrote a number of screenplays, including The English Speaker, about Josef Breuer's analysis of Anna O.; adaptations of Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer and Larry McMurtry's The Desert Rose;[33] a script about Jerry Lee Lewis; and a stage adaptation of the Japanese film Sansho the Bailiff that was to be directed by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, in addition to continuing work on the Q script.

[34] Although Q has never been made, Malick's work on the project provided material for his film The Tree of Life[35] and eventually became the basis for Voyage of Time.

A loose adaptation of James Jones's World War II novel of the same name, it features a large ensemble cast, including Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, Ben Chaplin, Elias Koteas, Woody Harrelson, George Clooney, and John Travolta.

While the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, critical reception was divided throughout its theatrical run; many praised its visuals and acting while finding its narrative unfocused.

Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and Sean Penn, it is a family drama spanning multiple time periods; it focuses on an individual's struggle to reconcile love, mercy and beauty with the existence of illness, suffering and death.

[68][69] Concurrent with these two features, Malick continued work on an Imax documentary, Voyage of Time, that examines the birth and death of the known universe.

[74] The film was shot in Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam, Germany, in the summer of 2016, and in parts of northern Italy, such as Brixen, South Tyrol, and the small mountain village of Sappada.

[79] Starring Angelina Jolie, it was shot at her and Brad Pitt's Château Miraval estate in Correns[80][81] and photographed by Austrian cinematographer Christian Berger.

On September 8, the cast was revealed to include Géza Röhrig as Jesus, Matthias Schoenaerts as Saint Peter, and Mark Rylance as four versions of Satan.

[86] According to film scholar Lloyd Michaels, Malick's main themes include "the isolated individual's desire for transcendence amidst established social institutions, the grandeur and untouched beauty of nature, the competing claims of instinct and reason, and the lure of the open road".

Like The Godfather films (1972, 1974), Nashville (1975), and The Deer Hunter (1978), Michaels argued that the movie delves into "certain national myths" as an idiosyncratic type of Western, "particularly the migration westward, the dream of personal success, and the clash of agrarian and industrial economies".

[87] Roger Ebert considered Malick's body of work to have a unifying common theme: "Human lives diminish beneath the overarching majesty of the world.

[89] While reviewing The Tree of Life, New York Times critic A. O. Scott compared Malick to innovative "homegrown romantics" such as the writers Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, James Agee, and Herman Melville, in the sense that their "definitive writings" also "did not sit comfortably or find universal favor in their own time" but nonetheless "leaned perpetually into the future, pushing their readers forward toward a new horizon of understanding".

Michaels said that in all of American cinema, Malick is the filmmaker most frequently "granted genius status after creating such a discontinuous and limited body of work".

[91] Michaels believed the opinions Days of Heaven continues to elicit among scholars and film enthusiasts exemplify this: "The debate continues to revolve around what to make of 'its extremities of beauty', whether the exquisite lighting, painterly compositions, dreamy dissolves, and fluid camera movements, combined with the epic grandeur and elegiac tone, sufficiently compensate for the thinness of the tale, the two-dimensionality of the characters, and the resulting emotional detachment of the audience.

"[87] Reverse Shot journalist Chris Wisniewski regarded both Days of Heaven and The New World not as "literary nor theatrical" but "principally cinematic" in their aesthetic, intimating narrative, emotional, and conceptual themes through the use of "image and sound" instead of "foregrounding dialogue, events or characters".