...the shadows of kids playing... upside down... like so many images in the film, it's life like we've always seen it, except like we've never seen it before. It's familiar but somehow alien.

Malick's earnest pretentiousness surely invites derisive laughter. But it also withstands it, and like the ancient evergreen of its title, it towers benevolently over less ambitious movies...

The Tree of Life in no way measured up.

If you work with a camera that is autonomous and distracted,as Malick does, with promiscuous principal photography that works from inspiration and not text... the meaning gets layered in selection, the decisive moment is then in the edit, not in shooting.