Metacritic reviews

Any number of sequences find feelings both externalized and hidden intermingling within the same shot, continuing in a subsequent image that carries the impression, the feeling, without replicating the exact tenor of what has just been seen. They exist simultaneously as certain backstories and what motivations they may inspire delicately unfold.

Song to Song is, once you root around for a story, the best of a recent trilogy.

Malick has found a way to translate how a familiar song has the ability to transport you back to a particular time and conjure a specific set of emotions. Whatever he’s been exploring over the past few years pays off here. Song to Song is far from his strongest film, but it’s his best and most exciting work since The Tree of Life.

Song To Song is one of the more accessible Malick films as of late, succeeding largely in part thanks to a cast who plays their dramatic beats like poetry in motion.

There’s plenty of intrigue to the dissonance of a hard-rock lifestyle and Malick’s gentle touch, but much of the movie’s potential is overshadowed by the impulses of a director unwilling to get there.

Those impatient with Malick’s cyclical fixations will easily find themselves worn out by Song To Song especially in the enervating third act that essentially repeats the entire movie and its theme exhaustingly.

Song to Song finds the maestro in broken-record mode, rehashing more or less the same themes against the backdrop of the Austin music scene — merely the latest borderline-awful Malick movie that risks to undermine the genius and mystery of his best work.

Ersatz local color aside, suffice to say that Song to Song is not designed to win back onetime admirers who felt Malick's To the Wonder and Knight of Cups drowned in their own navels. Though offering the occasional radiant moment (usually involving scenery), it is of a piece with those films.

A swirly-girly sameness has taken over Malick’s flow; his movies aren’t supposed to feel like fashion spreads but they do, even as hushed narrators speak about their aching souls and lost loves.

Song to Song was formerly known as Weightless, which would have suited its drifting, twirling rhythms. At least its new title doesn’t invite an en-masse sigh of: “well, quite”.