"THE TREE OF LIFE" GARNERS BOOS AND PRAISE IN CANNES

Still from Tree of Life

Despite some high expectations for The Thin Red Line Director Terence Malick’s latest work The Tree of Life, reviews unfortunately were mixed after today’s first screening of it at the Cannes Film Festival. Many have been awaiting the Film after multiple delays in its release, almost two years to be exact.

Although many top Critics had positive things to say about the philosophical Drama starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Sean Penn, there reportedly was a bit of "booing" post-screening, which some Critics like Eric Kohn of IndieWire, took to Twitter clarifying this as an exaggeration.

Here’s what some of the Critics are saying for The Tree of Life:

“This film is not for everyone, and I will admit I am agnostic about the final sequence, which suggests a closure and a redemption nothing else in the film has prepared us for. But this is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big.”. - PETER BRADSHAW - THE GUARDIAN

“As such, it is hardly a movie for the masses and will polarize even buffs, some of whom may fail to grasp the connection between the depiction of the beginnings of life on Earth and the travails of a 1950s Texas family. But there are great, heady things here, both obvious and evanescent, more than enough to qualify this as an exceptional and major film.”. - TODD MCCARTHY – HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

“Still, ‘The Tree of Life’ offers breathtaking imagery and even manages to survive an epic detour to the dawn of time, featuring the Big Bang, dinosaurs, meteors and all. It’s so ambitious and full of inquiring ideas and questions about our place in the world that, perhaps inevitably, it feels like a grand folly – albeit a heartfelt and stimulating one.”. - DAVE CALHOUN – TIME OUT

“The Tree of Life is something extraordinary… pure-grade art cinema.". - JUSTIN CHANG – VARIETY

So in a nutshell, we can expect it to be v. visually-oriented, not enough Sean Penn, slow-paced and ambitious. 

The Tree of Life opens on May 27, 2011 in Canada via eOne Films.

(Photo credit: eOne Films)