Winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, only the fifth American film in two decades to claim the coveted prize, Terrence Malick’s philosophical epic has already become the cinematic event of the year. Incorporating Malick’s trademark pastoral palette with spectacular sequences of cosmic creation and destruction (courtesy of 2001 special-effects wizard Douglas Trumbull), The Tree of Life is a visual poem that addresses some of the fundamental questions of human existence. In Waco, Texas in the 1950s, Brad Pitt is a stern patriarch trying to teach his three boys the ways of the world while clashing with the gentler philosophy of his wife (Jessica Chastain); decades later, Sean Penn plays one of the sons, now a lost soul adrift in a glass-and-steel world, searching for the past in his present. Endowing each moment, from the smallest (the tiny foot of a newborn baby) to the largest (the dawn and demise of the dinosaurs), with breathtaking beauty and majestic scope, Malick has made one of the great American films of the new century.