Toronto Film Festival: Who Cares That Terrence Malick's To The
Wonder Is Minor?  For the past week, Grierson has been at the
Toronto Film Festival seeing the movies we're all going to be
talking about for the next few months. Today is his first of two
dispatches.  Beyond his movies' other obvious strengths—their
poetic visuals, their melancholy portraits of Edens despoiled by
humanity—one of the most important elements of director Terrence
Malick's legacy is how reclusive he's been. After making a grand
total of two films in the 1970s, he went away for 20 years
before returning in 1998 with The Thin Red Line. Then another
seven years for The New World, then another six for The Tree of
Life. In between movies, he doesn't do interviews or serve on
juries of prestigious film festivals—he just disappears, which
only helps provide each new film with an air of excitement and
mystery. That shouldn't affect how we judge those movies, but
it's inevitable that sometimes it does.  His latest, To the
Wonder, premiered at