Metacritic reviews

Some movies are like Dorothy's twister; they just pick you up and whisk you away from the commonplace world you know to a world wondrous and astonishing. Days of Heaven is such a movie. [27 July 1998]

Above all one of the most beautiful films ever made. Malick's purpose is not to tell a story of melodrama, but one of loss. His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie. [7 Dec. 1997]

Director Malick endows this simple, timeless story with the enormous scope and resonance of myth through a clear vision unclouded by sentimentality and by a deft juxtaposition of image, music, and character.

A dramatically moving and technically breathtaking American art film, one of the great cinematic achievements of the 1970s.

It seems almost incontestably...the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. [23 March 1999]

Days of Heaven is the grand climax of the whole "Bonnie and Clyde"-"Badlands" tradition of outlaw-lovers-on-the-run movies. Shot by Nestor Almendros and the uncredited Haskell Wexler, it's a cinematographic masterpiece. [20 March 1998]

The result is a film that hovers just beyond our grasp--mysterious, beautiful, and, very possibly, a masterpiece.

The film, with its transcendentally beautiful visuals...is a rich and rewarding experience. [1 Sept. 2011]

The film has too much surface beauty not to earn it a recommendation, but Days of Heaven satisfies only on a sensory level.

It is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film.