n/a

"…which, strictly speaking, didn’t exist until the early 1940s"

reading comprehension: it's what's for dinner.

A.A. Dowd wrote, "There are the celebrated performances, in which fine actors wrestle with the single character trait they’ve been afforded—Channing Tatum just simmering and simmering as an inarticulate bull of a man, Steve Carell slapping on a fake schnoz to play the drowsy vampire of American privilege."

I'd say the voice-overs in his recent films dance back and forth between obviousness and obscurity. All the verbal abstraction ("she is my light," etc.) combined with the absence of characterization (who the hell are these people?) is kind of difficult. Malick's trying to balance that abstraction against the tactility…

If you got that from the NYT, then yes, they are wrong. And no it doesn't damage the point. Nor does it say anything about the way Malick's background in philosophy turns up in his films—I'd say that it's increasingly undigested, just big hunks of ponderous voice-over.

To reiterate, he was neither a professor nor tenured at MIT.

Malick wasn't a "tenured professor." He taught a few classes while pursuing a graduate degree he didn't finish. (You would have to have a Ph.D. to be a professor of philosophy at MIT.) I don't doubt he knows his Heidegger; he translated several of the man's lectures for Northwestern University Press.