The New World is the best movie of the year. ~Ross Douthat

On the other hand, he might also regret saying something as genuinely silly as this:

Malick has made a movie about the past that both takes the actual events seriously and raises them to the level of myth, or parable, and a movie about a cultural encounter that dares to embrace both cultures, to mourn the doom of one while celebrating both.

Except that the “cultural encounter” itself is a myth in its completely fictional rendering of John Smith and his relationship with the teenaged Pocahontas, and most of the “actual events” evidently fell by the wayside, except perhaps for the arrival of the English.