This splendid book tells a compelling story of Terrence Malick's life and work—a gift to film lovers who long to know more about the gifted director.
~George Stevens, Jr., author of My Place in the Sun: Life in the Golden Age of Hollywood and Washington and founder of the Kennedy Center Honors and the American Film Institute
Bleasdale's biography of Malick is as smart, readable, and penetrating as fans of the great director's films could wish for—a thrillingly engaged piece of work.
~Tom Shone, author of The Nolan Variations
Terrence Malick is one of the most brilliant yet enigmatic of American filmmakers, a contemplative visual poet beyond compare among modern auteurs. After a stunning debut with two of the finest movies of the 1970s, he vanished without public explanation for two decades, only to come back with several ambitious feature films that have been embraced by a devoted audience of admirers, and others that have flopped with both viewers and critics. John Bleasdale, one of our most thoughtful and best-informed film journalists and scholars, dives deep to explore the life and work of an elusive artist who has consistently challenged us with powerful, intense, and idiosyncratic movies that smash through the boundaries of conventional filmmaking.
~Glenn Frankel, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic
Offering in-depth accounts of the making of Malick's films, Bleasdale details how the director's stubbornness and inexperience hamstrung the production of his debut feature, Badlands, and how he privileged authenticity when filming The New World, erecting full-scale recreations of colonial Jamestown and its neighboring Powhatan settlement using only locally sourced materials and period-appropriate construction techniques. Background on how Malick's personal life influenced his films open a window onto his work.
~Publishers Weekly
A myth-shattering look into the life and career of the legendarily publicity-shy cinematic visionary.... But his in-depth research uncovered a very different picture from the media-crafted version of the director that developed during the lengthy gap between his second film, Days of Heaven (1978), and its follow-up, The Thin Red Line (1998). In doing so, the author tells of a complex artist and human being whose films, good and bad, are among the most thrillingly original works of art on the planet.... No matter how you feel about Malick's oeuvre, this book is a must for cinephiles.
~Kirkus Starred Review
John Bleasdale's impressive new biography The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick reveals many crucial and insightful details on the filmmaker's life course, from his Persian family history and fledgling youth in Oklahoma-Texas to an ongoing artistic career, spanning over half of a century.... For those curious as to how Malick curated such a sui generis approach to filmmaking, this text serves as both a series illuminating windows into the myth of the artist and a tonic for any doubts one might have levied against him. ... While honoring aspects of Malick's known preference for privacy, Bleasdale imparts many formative and absorbing details on this mysterious figure. In so doing, he humanizes the mythic Malick and illuminates the biography of a man whose fascinating personal journey through life is truly the stuff of legend.
~Film International
John Bleasdale's impressive biography of Terrence Malick, The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick, opens a window into the life of a somewhat private filmmaker and offers insight into his work, including The Tree of Life. There are also little-known stories about his past, including the time he played basketball with Fidel Castro.
~The Independent
A reclusive filmmaker with a famously challenging oeuvre, experimental American auteur Terrence Malick is an ambitious choice of subject for critic John Bleasdale's first non-fiction book. However, through elegantly framed prose, erudite criticism and meticulous research, Bleasdale more than rises to that challenge, mounting a biographical study of Malick and his movies that makes for illuminating reading.
~Empire Magazine
Go inside the world of one of Hollywood's most acclaimed filmmakers in The Magic Hours, author John Beasdale's inside look at Terrence Malick. If you're a movie wonk, you'll dig reading about the acclaimed lensman whose heralded films are often cited for their use of soft natural lighting shortly after sunrise or before sunset, the so-called 'magic hour,' a term that his work ushered into filmmaking lingo.
~The Entertainment Forecast
Through this lens, Malick's supposedly pretentious, philosophical films transform into substantial works full of personal urgency. Bleasdale's biography thus provides a total reorientation of Malick's work, allowing you to experience his films in a different context.... This book should actually be mandatory homework, so that one can experience and interpret this long-awaited new film with the right eye.
~Filmkrant
[A] brisk, well-researched biography.... Whatever you think of Malick's work, this book makes abundantly clear that 'the black hole of his presence or absence in the media landscape still bends light around it.'
~Sight and Sound
One of the strengths of John Bleasdale's The Magic Hoursis that it punctures some of the long-standing myths associated with the most famous cinematic Sasquatch of them all....(it) helps us understand why Malick's films remain so compelling.
~FILM & HISTORY
Bleasdale does an excellent job of revealing details that may not be known to even some of the most ardent fans.... The Magic Hours is the first book to give a true biographical outline of the mysterious figure that Malick is, and Bleasdale does a splendid job of giving Malick fans and film buffs as much as possible about the filmmaker.
~Cinema Sentries
John Bleasdale's The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick... is a rapturously detailed, sensitively observed, critically insightful account, in which the filmmaker emerges as someone whose presence, long kept out of public view, appears to have entranced more or less everyone with whom he crossed paths—and whose personal life stands in peculiar and powerful relation to his artistry.
~The New Yorker
