This is Terence Mallick's magnus opus in my opinion- and yes, I am aware of the fact that this is Malick I speak of, a man who has made some masterpieces. Tree of Life encompasses everything- from the search of purpose and meaning to the beginning and end of time itself. Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain and the kids all are more than competent and would have jumped at the chance of working with a master. Beautifully shot as only Malick can(the camera flows so smoothly) and containing what I consider one of the most important sequences(beginning of time) ever put on film The Tree of Life is a work of art.

The Tree of Life by philosopher auteur Terence Malik is a poetry in motion that encompasses the lifetime of our Universe and the complexities of living. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain play a couple living in America of the 50s. They have three boys and as the film progresses we learn that the middle child passes away. Half the film is about this family and how the father teaches the boys the harsh cruelties of life and the other half is the grown child- played by Sean Penn wandering across a city full of skyscrapers- it could be any modern western city, and he is lost and confused. Also somehow juxtaposed alongside is a small segment that shows the birth of the Universe, life on Earth all the way from bacteria to dinosaurs and the modern apes. This is a masterpiece.

"The Tree of Life - for most people either one of the best or one of the worst films they've ever seen. Completely incomprehensible to some but visually stunning to all. This highly ambitious project by Terrence Malick goes back all the way to 1970s but finally saw the light in 2011 baffling the audience with it's combination of family drama, existential themes and what seems more like a nature documentary. Even today most people don't know what to make of it..." The rest of this video essay about this movie you can see/hear in a video I put a link to at the end of the review. A must watch after you watch the movie. There is just so much to take in with this movie, you just have to look deeper beyond it's face value. And even then there is so many ways you can interpret it. A truly unique piece of art you can experience by yourself now."The Tree of Life - Crafting an Existential Masterpiece"

Film Review: "The Tree Of Life" (2011)This 32 Million Dollars of production expenses absorbing motion picture, shot during the year of 2008 on several camera systems stretching from classic 35mm film stock cameras as Arriflex 435 to HD super slow-motion Phantom manufactured digital camera systems handled by Academy Award Winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, provided with a shot-list loosely based on an original script by Director Terrence Malick, who since that day forward, worked with Hollywood Stars of the highest order to threat together emotions in time and space, creating a motion picture of illusions with hardly any full circling character arc, instead leaving the characters to the magic of an infinite screening in single moments of truth.Since his twenty-year-break from filmmaking between "Days of Heaven" (1978) and "The Thin Red Line" (1998), arguably his most accomplished work of cinema, Director Terrence Malick does not seem interested in putting an effort in to connect shots and scenes to sequences as Director David Lean (1908-1991) as in "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957) would have done to let the audience take a fully embodied emotion home for the time being. "The Tree of Life" does nothing of this order. The picture, over two years in post-production to be put on hold by the end of 2010 in order to have a world premiere screening on May 16th 2011 at the 64th Edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where the enchanted cast, surrounding conservative couple playing Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in Texas, USA of the 1950s and Sean Penn as the lone wolf in glass-steel canyons of the top-management working class in the 2000s, leading to gathering of all characters and all time zones on a beach with no further explanations then just leaving the audience under the musical score of Alexandre Desplat to themselves for a cinema-loving-minority to witness and to be experienced again and again in future screenings."The Tree of Life" has not become a motion picture that made an impact over the last six and half years that have past since winning the Palme D'Or over "Persona Non Grata" punished Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" in the year 2011 of further cinematic extravaganza, which certainly lets Director Terrence Malick's kaleidoscopic film on human transcendence and consequences of childhood-implanted domestic violence stand apart from the rest in that year's circuit with signature-defining shot collections in hours and hours of raw footage of free-spirited actors that haunt the director for years to come toward his latest entrance with the same directorial technique "Song to Song" (2017), which took him four years to complete into a let-go two-hour-editorial presented in March 2017.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)