Knight of Cups Review

Emmanuel Lubezki's camera never stops drifting, and whatever else is going on here, the photography is a real achievement: wide lenses held low, daylight bent through glass towers, a party in an emptied Los Angeles house shot as though the operator wandered in uninvited. Terrence Malick threw out the screenplay, handing his cast situations instead of lines, and the result is a picture about a screenwriter's spiritual exhaustion that is itself exhausted.

Bale is asked to be a blank at the center and he obliges, moving through ten chapters, all but the last named for a tarot card, while women arrive, orbit and dissolve. Cate Blanchett gets nearest to a character, Natalie Portman is handed a grief the film never set up, and the others are costumes in sunlight. The whispered narration reaches for scripture and lands on fortune cookie.

One stretch works completely, the earthquake that shakes Rick awake in his modernist apartment and sends him out into the street on his knees, and Antonio Banderas is very funny for four minutes. A film about emptiness still has to be about something, and this one keeps mistaking the depiction of drift for an argument about it.