The legend goes that, after watching Silence, Terrence Malick wrote a letter to Martin Scorsese asking “What does Christ require of us?” As a question prompted by the film, it was a good one, well-merited and existentially urgent. What does Christ require of us? Must we confess Him only in our hearts, or also in our words? What great deeds must we do to be worthy of Him? For someone like Malick, like myself, like countless others who take matters of…

“People need something to believe in.”

Uh, what. 

I remembered this being very funny, and very gorgeous, and very smart. I did not remember it being—at the risk of understating things—very good. I’d hardly gotten three minutes in before I regretted not having a phone or pencil handy, and it only intensified from there (certainly did not expect Rango to be the film that first made me consider the near-universal godlessness of the western genre by virtue of favorable comparison,…