Owen Gleiberman, of Entertainment Weekly, reviews "The Tree of Life."

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Terrence Malick’s much-talked-about new film, "The Tree of Life," is, I think, an amazing, transporting experience. And I don’t say that as any sort of Terrence Malick groupie. This is the fifth film he’s directed, and I’ve liked exactly two of them -- "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven." Yet, "The Tree of Life" clarifies Malick as a filmmaker. It’s really the big, lyrical cosmic statement he’s been building towards, and now it’s as if it had just burst out of him.

The heart of the film is set in the 1950s, and it tells the story of three brothers, with Brad Pitt as the stern father and Jessica Chastain as the soulful, saintly, recessive mother. Set just before television had really taken over, "The Tree of Life" presents a vision of growing up that is so organic, so unpolluted by media, that every moment becomes a kind of discovery. It’s as if James Joyce had been given a hand-held camera. When Brad Pitt gets the right role, he’s commanding to watch. Wearing a very straight haircut that brings out the slightly crude, sandpapery quality of his handsomeness, he plays this ‘50s dad with hints of brutality, yet also with a deep tenderness that he almost can’t put into words.

Sean Penn plays one of the sons, years later, haunted in the present day, and in a way he’s the stand-in for all of us, looking back at our pasts. "The Tree of Life" also has an extended cosmic prologue that, when you hear about it, sounds like something made by a filmmaker who took too many drugs. Malick has basically staged the formation of the earth, and he’s done it, the way Kubrick did in 2001, as a duet between science and religion. Malick wants us to feel the majesty of existence. Yet what I think is powerful about the film’s religious overtones is that they’re all of a piece with the naturalistic ’50s drama at its heart.

"The Tree of Life" is a movie about the transcendence in every moment.