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7. Song to Song   After the release of “The Tree of Life,” there was a change in the career of director Terrence Malick, made much more prolific and marked by experimentation with narrative freedom. This stage is made up of the following films: “To the Wonder,” “Knight of Cups” and “Song to Song,” all of them shot and released in the last six years. This recent trilogy has two characteristic elements: the absence of a script, leaving room for improvisation, and the importance of the visual versus narrative aspect.

Two interrelated love triangles, the couples formed by composers Faye (Rooney Mara) and BV (Ryan Gosling) and music producer Cook (Michael Fassbender) and Rhonda, his waitress girlfriend (Natalie Portman), are all pursuing success while stumbling with the obsession and the betrayal in the world of the music scene of Austin, Texas.

In this new film from Malick, we see the same existential characters with the same internal conflicts, same structure, same voiceovers, same cinematography, and same beauty overall as in the previous two films, but with better results. The only thing that changes is the environment, in which these helpless characters move in an eternal search for their fragmented selves in the middle of an ideal country, where nothing satisfies them.

Malick keeps his narrative somewhat diffuse, not at all linear or conventional, where the chronological order is altered, causing the viewer to feel somewhat confused and amazed by what he sees. He also shows us his bold and impossible camera angles when it comes to capturing the scenes, making use of natural light and unusual framing, always chasing the characters and getting ahead of them to show their poetic meditations, gestures, emotions, reactions, and everything they experience while they are on screen.

Overall, “Song to Song” is a romantic drama that continues along the path initiated by the two previous films by the director, with which, though it shares many elements with them, manages this time to stand out by making what we care for happen on the screen. It is already known that for his next film, Malick will have a script and a marked structure, the first time since 2005 with “The New World.” So let’s see what the future holds for him.

1. A Ghost Story   A musician dies in a car accident and returns as a ghost to the house where he lived with his wife.

In the first minutes of footage, it seemed that it was going to turn, once the initial grace was over, into a parsimonious thing in which we would only see the ghost watching his neighborhood through the window, and his wife doing housework or dragging her pain as a soul in pain through the corridors of the house. However, it derives in one of the most original and curious works from American independent cinema in recent times – a fresh and very creative work that reflects very intelligently on time, which the ghost perceives in a different way.

“A Ghost Story” is an exceptional case of how a normal movie, whether correct or good, extends its limits in its assimilation and becomes, simply, a contingent experience. Pretentious, yes, but there is no art without pretension.

It’s a highly recommended film, with very slow pacing that takes it away from the general audience. It is hard to get over, especially from the beginning, but there is a moment that catches you and manages to twist your soul. Roughly 90 minutes of love and pain, where time and memories determine existence.