Reviews
Empire Magazine
Ian Nathan
"There is simply nothing like it out there: profound, idiosyncratic, complex, sincere and magical; a confirmation that cinema can aspire to art."
01/07/2011
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
"[Malick] takes us to the great unanswerable question, which we will all spend our lives trying, increasingly strenuously, to avoid – why does anything exist at all? 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."
07/07/2011
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
"It is wonderful flowing film-making, quite hypnotic, each of its scenes feeling necessary, both particular and universal … Malick's films take time to appreciate but they are worth that time. See The Tree of Life and then see it again. It's a major event."
08/07/2011
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Time Magazine
Richard Corliss
"As Malick sees it, the moviegoer is not an infant; the director is not a babysitter. It's fine if you don't get all of The Tree of Life. But try to get with it. If you do, you may be lifted into the movie's cosmos, micro- or macro-. There will be times when the great spirit moves you, and your feet won't touch the ground."
16/05/2011
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The Times
Kate Muir
"In the end, The Tree of Life is about what you bring to it, thanks to the silence of Malick on the meaning of his work. The timeworn, experienced viewer may find this a richer dish than the younger one. For me, this film reflects and refracts our lives from all angles, and gloriously so. "
08/07/2011
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Total Film
Jonathan Crocker
"It’s an extraordinary grasping stretch – across space and time – to touch what will always be just out of our reach. It’s a captivating, unmissable experience … Terrence Malick’s spiritual odyssey is baffling, unique and overspilling with wonder. Don’t wait for the DVD."
05/07/2011
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The Spectator
Deborah Ross
"...even though it is grandiose and humourless and preposterous it is also fantastically fresh, rich and fascinating … Ideally, you would bathe in a film like this without striving to decipher it. As it’s a film about what we can’t get our heads around, we are probably not meant to get our heads round it. But, even so, it is so audacious it will take your breath away. I’m still waiting for mine to return."
09/07/2011
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The Scotsman
Terrence Malick
"…in an era in which even the so-called independent cinema is ruled by a cowardly herd instinct, you really have to admire Malick's guts for making an uncompromising, spiritually minded film. Yes, it's flawed - including keening voiceovers that don't know when to shut up - but The Tree of Life is both a visually enthralling and a thrillingly ambitious attempt to grasp at a very big picture."
05/07/2011
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
"…I suppose I [enjoyed The Tree of Life], in the sense that it absorbed, and intrigued, and delighted the eye, as every Malick film has done since his debut Badlands back in 1973. But pleasure, for any filmgoer, is necessarily bound up with discrimination, a need to examine how the parts work within the whole; and once you begin to unpick its admittedly beautiful fabric the thing no longer feels quite satisfying. It doesn't even feel properly finished."
08/07/2011
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
"... beautiful and banal, brilliant and boring, intoxicating and infuriating, sublime and silly, mysterious and obvious ... Despite a fine performance from Pitt — he captures the tragedy of the parental tyrant perfectly — this troubled relationship between father and son never really goes anywhere or involves us in the way it should. Yes, The Tree of Life is a work of art — and maybe that’s the problem. Ultimately, it has the cold emotional distance of an art installation."
10/07/2011
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The Observer
Jason Solomons
"It demands hush and attention but it also craves reverence; it certainly requires calm, a work that needs to be watched, not just recollected, in tranquillity."
10/07/2011
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Time Out
David Calhoun
"…its ambition and willingness to lay itself open to interpretation are hard to fault. But it’s also hard not to conclude that this hugely anticipated, epic movie from the lesser-spotted, 67-year-old poet of American cinema is a work that stretches itself so broadly by asking Big Questions that it ends up dealing in platitudes … It doesn’t always communicate well, and when it does, it can be trite, but it’s a film that’s incredibly beautiful and wide open for the taking."
07/07/2011
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The Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
"Malick's intention is to use style and skill to imbue the ordinary with significance, to elevate this small-scale, single-family drama by interweaving it with cosmic preoccupations and the older Jack's soul-searching. While Malick's great ability holds us for a time, it is finally not enough to compensate for a lack of dramatic involvement — those eschatological quandaries tend to overwhelm the story. The Tree of Life, its enormous advantages notwithstanding, ends up a film that demands to be admired but cannot be easily embraced."
26/05/2011
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The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
"Afflatus has an unhappy habit, as Malick has proved before, of subsiding into a monotone. Tucked away inside the grandeur, though, and enlivened by jump cuts, is a sharp, not unharrowing story of a father and son, and, amid one’s exasperation, there is no mistaking Malick’s unfailing ability to grab at glories on the fly."
30/05/2011
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The Daily Express
Caroline Jowett
"It is a melancholy attempt to complete the circle of life that leaves you with more questions than answers. The Tree Of Life is far from perfect but it is a film of great beauty and longing: a philosophical rummage through the troubling memories of a lost America."
08/07/2011
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Channel 4 Film
Catherine Bray
"Malick's film has its moments and certainly creates an impression visually, but you could say the same thing about Transformers: Dark Of The Moon. Despite its problems, and our resevations, we'd recommend those who are serious about cinema should see, and discuss, this film."
01/07/2011
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Uncut Magazine
Jonathan Romney
"While it’s hard not to be bowled over by its immense ambition, it’s difficult to connect with a film that’s so unambiguously religious … The result can feel like an evangelical sermon on an IMAX scale. For better or worse, though, The Tree Of Life pushes American cinema into regions uncharted since Stanley Kubrick’s heyday."
01/07/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Sukhdev Sandhu
"Achingly slow, almost buckling under the weight of its swoony poetry, so self-absorbed that it’s unable even to begin to lightly paste its disparate elements into a cohesive narrative, it degenerates into a pastiching-compilation of its director’s tics and tendencies, all soundtracked by hosannas and grandiose symphonics. 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."
07/07/2011
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The New Statesman
Ryan Gilbey
"On first viewing of the film, at least, it feels as though two unconnected ideas have been jerry-rigged together … But still, you couldn't describe Malick's take on Genesis as a weak link within a stronger work, so much as a tenuous one. Sean Penn, wandering gravely through offices and deserts, comes closest to seeming incongruous, and even he grows into a kind of audience surrogate, with his dazed expression that seems to say: "Now, what did I come in here for?""
07/07/2011
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
"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."
07/07/2011
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