THE TREE OF LIFE Director: TERRENCE MALICK 138 minutes| U.S.A.| 2011| Colour| Dolby Digital Stereo| 35mm Book cinema tickets Terrence Malick travels from the dawn of the universe to a ’50s Texas suburb to afterlife points beyond with The Tree of Life, a magnum opus in which the cosmic and the microcosmic are unified in service of a poetic, highly personal inquiry into man’s relationship to God, his kinship with his environment, and his capacity for compassion and violence. Unconventionally structured with free-flowing, elliptical lyricism, Malick’s Cannes prize-winner touches on the Big Bang, the birth of dinosaurs, and the tense household of Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain’s parents, whose oldest son (Hunger McCracken) played as an adult by Sean Penn, and functioning as the director’s proxy grapples with his contradictory feelings towards both his father and His Heavenly Father. A religious rumination on humanity’s light/dark warring heart and the extent of the Almighty’s hand in our fates, it’s an apotheosis of the auteur’s formal and thematic preoccupations, and one that plays like a swirling, plummeting, kaleidoscopic reverie of lucid memories. (Notes by Nick Schager). Director: TERRENCE MALICK 138 minutes| U.S.A.| 2011| Colour| Dolby Digital Stereo| 35mm