REVIEWED - THE NEW WORLD: TERRENCE Malick has made only four films in the past 30 years, and the style he is currently embracing - a blend of new age reverie and wildlife documentary - was only properly perfected in his last picture, 1997's The Thin Red Line.

But The New World, an attempt to reclaim the story of Pocahontas for adults, still comes across a little like self-parody. Here is a spider. Now listen to some musings on eternity. Look, a snake. "Why does the earth have colours?" Wallow awhile in these swaying grasses. And so on.

Well, Malick's approach may allow cheap pastiche, but this stirringly beautiful film features a handful of the most striking cinematic effects you'll ever experience.

The first meeting between the British settlers and the Algonquin people of Virginia is choreographed like a peculiar ballet. Scored to the oblique fanfare that opens Wagner's Das Rheingold, the sequence begins with the ships bearing down on a verdant shoreline. Later the puzzled explorers, among them Colin Farrell's rough John Smith, allow themselves to be scrutinised, pawed and, most evocatively, smelt by the people they call naturals. Similar moments of eccentric splendour abound.

The story, as fans of Disney's sickeningly right-on Pocahontas will be aware, sees the young Algonquin princess saving Smith, here a rugged individualist with a broad Dublin accent, from ritual slaughter by her own people. Later she builds bridges between the two camps, before, after getting a little too friendly with the newcomers, being sold to them in exchange for a copper cooking pot. Malick, his own screenwriter as always, here returns to the historical records and, following Smith's recall to England, has the young girl marry Christian Bale's gentler, more thoughtful colonist.

I'm not sure Terrence cares much for actors. Or, rather, I'm not sure he likes seeing actors act. The romance between Smith and Pocahontas is represented more through movement, montage and narration than any significant vocal exchange. When Farrell and young Q'orianka Kilcher, a charismatic 15-year-old of South American descent, are face to face they are still often asked to utter their thoughts as voice-over. The director's own unique aesthetic rules all. We are in no doubt as to who is in charge here.

Philosophically as well as stylistically, Malick asserts himself on every frame. The New Word's analysis of the colonisation of America involves some very simplistic divisions: naturals frolicking in prelapsarian bliss; craggy-toothed colonisers bickering like infants.

But the weaknesses of the picture are ultimately overpowered by the poetic sweep of the director's vision. Ingmar Bergman is equally easy to parody and he's made the odd decent picture. Donald Clarke