I remember learning that, in 1500, a squirrel—a determined squirrel, mind you—could leap from tree to tree from New York to North Carolina. The prairie grass that began at the border of what would become Kansas was so tall that a man on horseback would disappear once he rode into it, like the way the ballplayers disappeared in Field of Dreams. Thirty million buffalo filled the prairie.

I don’t know that any director, not since John Ford and Monument Valley, has had the visual instinct for what America was like seventy, 150 or 400 years ago, as Terrence Malick has shown in his films, which are lyrical and almost leisurely the latter being purposeful: the rhythm gives you time enough to enjoy the nation’s beauty and the shock of his action sequences hit you that much harder.

Here are three favorites: Badlands (1973), based on the true story of two teens, Charlie Starkweather and Carol Fugate who become killers in 1958.

For Days of Heaven (1978), Malick had to shoot in Alberta to give an authentic sense to what Texas wheatland was like in 1916.

Finally, Malick had the audacity to go back to the encounter between The First People and Europeans in 1607. This is his film The New World.