Terrence Malick’s latest (or, more aptly, his fifth magnum opus in a tantalizingly restrained career meted out over four decades) is an unprecedented, startlingly beautiful philosophical and aesthetic treatment of life’s unanswerable questions. Loosely set in Malick’s birth town of Waco, Texas, in the 1950s, it’s perhaps also his most personal film to date. Eschewing the contrivances of traditional cinematic narrative, The Tree of Life literally constructs natural drama with its montages of some of the most flabbergasting documentary images of our universe’s unutterable beauty. More sustainedly impressionistic than any of his previous films (and earning comparisons to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey), it’s amongst the most important cinematic explorations of human existence ever to grace the screen.