The Tree of Life Reviews
We Got This Covered
The lack of story or purpose is annoying and at times, the film is too experimental. Topping things off is an abrupt and unsatisfying ending which doesn't leave us with good feelings towards the film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/10
Dial M For Movies
Malik's vision and deeply powerful imagery outlives its welcome after 20 minutes, leaving a film that meanders along trying to impress with concepts and ideas.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
ABC Radio (Australia)
It feels like Malick made the film for himself, rather than for an audience.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
ABC Radio Brisbane
There are some touching scenes between father and son but the rest of the film felt too heavy-handed.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Bullz-Eye.com
The final product feels less like the grand-scale epic that Malick intended, and more like a college thesis paper on spirituality that's missing a few pages.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Top CriticGlibly put, this challenging time-skipping rumination is the big screen equivalent of watching that "Tree" grow.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Absurdly over-rated...
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Birmingham Post
Like watching your whole life crawl towards you on its hands and knees.
FilmFestivals.com
A young couple raises three boys in the 1950s. Both Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as the couple function from textbook gender roles, like Father Knows Best with an axe to grind.
Full Review
| Original Score: Overripe
HitFix
For me, this is a pretty crushing disappointment, something that's hard to admit and even harder to write.
MediaMikes
While I was writing this I learned that "The Tree of Life" had won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival...I can only assume that the judges were all cinematographers awarding a film consisting of Kodak moments.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Film4
Possibly it reinforces our awareness that finding any sort of path through life is a pretty overwhelming business, but this is not a terribly radical conclusion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
tonymacklin.net
The Tree of Life is a fractured film, so they needed five different editors to put it back together. I heard the original title was going to be The Humpty Dumpty of Life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
St. Paul Pioneer Press
What we're left with is a scrapbook of stunning images.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
FILMINK (Australia)
Malick resides largely in his own vivid imagination and overly active subconscious, where it's just too easy for everybody else to get resolutely and inescapably lost.
Urban Cinefile
The title suggests a grand vision about humanity, but this is at best garbled and perfunctory
Empire Magazine Australasia
Apart from a middle section which reveals moments of clarity and actual emotion, this is a bloated, self-indulgent bore of fine imagery.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2
Washington City Paper
With its parallel depictions of the birth of the universe and a family in 1950s Texas, it must be plumbing deep meanings, right? Eh.
Spectrum (St. George, Utah)
Impressionistic may be a nice way to describe this often baffling mix of stunning cosmic imagery mixed with random snapshots of familial struggle...very, very different..
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Richmond.com
I admire The Tree of Life - in the same way I admire the white-haired lady in the Guinness Book of World Records with 28-foot fingernails. By the way, after "The Tree of Life," you'll probably have to cut your nails, just saying.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
