Terrence Malick

Suddenly, the mystery of Terrence Malick, the Hollywood dropout who wrote and directed the acclaimed "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven" in the '70s, isn't so mysterious. Malick is planning a comeback--first as a playwright, and then as a movie writer-director, and has chosen Polish director Andrzej Wajda as his stage collaborator and set a timetable for his return.

The 64th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will not be a somber affair, general delegate Thierry Fremaux announced at the unveiling of the official selection Thursday morning. "This will be a Cannes where we can have fun," he said. Certainly this is a festival that will be a mix of established and new filmmakers with such big-ticket auteurs as Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodovar, Aki Kaurismaki, Terrence Malick and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne facing off with such newer talents as Australia's Julia Leigh, France's Maiwenn and Denmark's Nicolas Winding Refn.

The big question at the Directors Guild of America awards dinner was not who would win--Steven Spielberg's victory was almost a foregone conclusion--but whether the reclusive Terrence Malick would make an appearance. The answer was yes--but in his own distinct fashion.

"The Tree of Life" introduces a character pondering the meaning of existence as he searches for the answers to the universe's most perplexing questions. Undeniably impressive, it's a film that will have viewers posing questions as well, just not the ones its director may have intended. For what Terrence Malick's complex, extraordinarily ambitious and years-in-the-making new feature unintentionally does is makes people ask what they want out of cinema. Are you looking for serious philosophizing, fluid filmmaking and stunning images?

The film's director hasn't made a movie since Jimmy Carter was president and Leonardo DiCaprio was in preschool. In August, in his hometown of Austin, Texas, a local theater featured a tribute to him as part of a "great directors" series that included two of his movies--his only two. He doesn't do interviews and won't be doing any to promote his film, even though Hollywood is bankrolling him to the tune of more than $50 million.

Like a mid-season coaching hire for a losing ballclub, director Bennett Miller inherited an uphill battle when he was brought in as the director of a shaky project called "Moneyball," but he had two key players on his side — and both of them were named Brad Pitt. With its half-dozen Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations, "Moneyball" is now viewed as a quality contender in the Oscar nomination race, but the sports-film-with-a-message was clearly a longshot project back when Miller stepped in following the summer 2009 departure of Steven Soderbergh, who had spent years developing the script.

Veteran production designer Jack Fisk is a frequent collaborator with director Terrence Malick, joining him on such films as "Badlands," "The New World" and "The Thin Red Line" before teaming up again for this year's "The Tree of Life" from Fox Searchlight. The movie, a meditative and highly impressionistic story of a small-town family in the 1950s, was shot over several months in 2008 in a variety of locations — Smithville, Texas, as well as Houston, the Goblin Valley and the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, Mono Valley and Death Valley in California and the shoreline of the Colorado River at the Gulf of Mexico — all of which Fisk had to adapt to Malick's vision.

At most Hollywood premieres, the star of the movie doesn't have to convince the audience to sit through their film. But that was the case at the unveiling of Terrence Malick's "To the Wonder" Tuesday night, as Ben Affleck implored a theater full of people to stick with a movie that didn't follow a linear structure. "I have probably said more up here than I do in the entire film," he joked to a crowd at West Hollywood's Pacific Design Center. Indeed, as a man torn between a French beauty (Olga Kurylenko)

It's always fun to look at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' annual list of invitees and wonder: Really, him? But almost as enjoyable is looking at who's been invited and asking why they weren't already in. And this year's group of 176 offers some doozies. Topping the list is Andy Serkis. The actor who's considered the leading practitioner of what's known as digitized acting has been a fan (and critical) favorite for years. His work as performance-capture creatures in “The Lord of the Rings,” “ King Kong” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” has prompted calls for the Oscars to widen the criteria for acting prizes.

LIKE some fleeting cosmological phenomenon, the appearance of a new Terrence Malick movie always seems to augur a shift in the Hollywood heavens -- or at least that portion of heaven inhabited by cloud-borne cineastes. Now that Stanley Kubrick has passed on, Malick is the undisputed recluse/auteur of the film business, the director the most movie people would most like to work with if only they could find him.