Malick’s The Tree of Life: Visionary or vainglorious?

The Tree of Life, American director Terrence Malick's first film in six years, and only his fifth full-length film in a 37-year career, was screened this morning in Cannes to a decidedly mixed reaction.

The Guardian's Xan Brooks reported that there was "loud booing" at the end of the screening of the long-awaited drama, which stars Brad Pitt and Sean Penn.

But then, Malick's ambitious epic, which spans the ages from the beginning of life on Earth to the 1950s in the director's native Texas, was always likely to inspire extreme emotions on either end of the critical scale.

The independent British film magazine Little White Lies cattily summed up the film as a "glorified perfume ad" while Sight & Sound magazine tweeted that it was a "folie de grandeur".

However, Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw's instant reaction to the film was to hail it as "magnificent and mad", while his colleague Brooks said it was the "Book of Revelations by way of Main St. Almost ridiculous, always sublime". The Times' chief film critic Kate Muir tweeted that The Tree of Life showed "Malick off his tree. In a good way".

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING ABOUT THE TREE OF LIFE:Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter: "Brandishing an ambition it's likely no film, including this one, could entirely fulfill, The Tree of Life is a singular work, an impressionistic metaphysical inquiry into mankind's place in the grand scheme of things that releases waves of insights amidst its narrative imprecisions. It is hardly a movie for the masses and will polarize even buffs. But there are great, heady things here, both obvious and evanescent, more than enough to qualify this as an exceptional and major film."

Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian: "Terrence Malick's mad and magnificent film descends slowly, like some sort of prototypical spaceship: it's a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy, a meditation on memory... This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale... Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison."

Justin Chang, Variety: "A magnum opus that's been kicking around inside Malick's head for decades and awaited by his fans for almost as long, the film will certainly invite even-more-vociferous-than-usual charges of pretension and overambition, criticisms that are admittedly not entirely without merit here... The Tree of Life is nothing less than a hymn to the glory of creation, an exploratory, often mystifying 138-minute tone poem that will test any Malick non-fan's patience for whispery voiceover and flights of lyrical abstraction..."

Anthony Breznican, Entertainment Weekly: "The Tree of Life is an elegiac litany of images and memory-like scenes more than a traditional narrative. In brief, it's the origin of time and infinity through the lens of one troubled, 1950s-era Texas family. It stars Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, though they share copious screen time with evolving galaxies, nebulae, and surreal, symbolic representations of the world beyond."

The Playlist, IndieWire:"The Tree Of Life is not the cinema-changing, soul-shattering masterpiece it has been built up into. That said, it's a hugely ambitious and occasionally brilliant undertaking that finds the director using the story of a fractured relationship between a father and his children to ask the question of ages: where is God? The film is about the two paths that Malick believes are presented to us in life: the way of nature vs. the way of the grace." ·