The Tree of Life: Press reviews

'There is simply nothing like it out there: profound, idiosyncratic, complex, sincere and magical; a confirmation that cinema can aspire to art.'

'It is wonderful flowing film-making, quite hypnotic, each of its scenes feeling necessary, both particular and universal.'

'this new film feels like the purest and most perfect expression of his unique cinematic worldview'.

'This film may not be for everyone, but it makes other movies and other movie-makers look timid and feeble. I am an evangelist for it.'

At Cannes: 'This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison'

'The Tree Of Life is beautiful. Ridiculously, rapturously beautiful'.

At Cannes: 'Many people will recognise something of their own childhood in this Texan odyssey, which can never get enough of a mystical sense of the world at large as well as the minute bits and pieces of growing up'

At Cannes: 'There are great, heady things here, both obvious and evanescent, more than enough to qualify this as an exceptional and major film'

At Cannes: 'The imagination lives by risk, including the risk of incomprehension. Do all the parts of "The Tree of Life" cohere? Does it all make sense? I can't say that it does. I suspect, though, that sometime between now and Judgment Day it will'

At Cannes: 'A cinematic symphony more than a classic narrative film, Terrence Malick's long-awaited The Tree Of Life has moments of breathtaking visual and aural beauty, but in the end it has us longing for the days of Badlands, Days Of Heaven or The Thin Red Line, when the Texan auteur also knew how to spin a good yarn'

'Nobody else could have made it. Few would even dare to try'.

'It's a prodigious work, a magnum opus and then some'.

At Cannes: 'Few American filmmakers are as alive to the splendor of the natural world as Terrence Malick, but even by his standards, "The Tree of Life" represents something extraordinary'

'a deeply personal work that reveals the author's soul. It will strike chords with anyone who has ever questioned life and death'.

"The hippie, Taoist, animist Malick of old is still there but, suddenly, I felt preached at. The dinosaurs, I can take; the souls on the beach, the hugging and the rapprochement with God, that's too much. Maybe I just climb a different tree."

'As a film it's nothing if not bold - and the second half is the work of Malick The Genius - but if you decide to go, just don't expect a narrative'.

At Cannes: 'It doesn't always communicate well, and when it does, it's sometimes trite, but it's also a film that's incredibly beautiful and wide open for the taking'

'For his admirers, Malick's films are churches that cast their audiences as worshippers in search of higher truths; The Tree of Life invites only sniggering in the pews'.

'Mystical babble has its finest hour – or closer to three – in this epic that alternates eye-ravishing images with a kind of pentathlon pantheism. You sit there at the end exhausted, feeling you have seen either everything or (just as draining if you came with high hopes) nothing.'