Perhaps I need film school training, or a finer sensitivity, but Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life just looks horridly pretentious to me:
Life is a miraculous, transcendent thing, for sure. And I assume that all of us, at some point, feel the world open up around us. But there's something a little precious and sensitive about a movie that's entirely about a perpetual sense of wonder. It doesn't make anyone exceptionally special to feel that they're tugged between their father and their mother's tendencies. I'm sure there's more to the world than this. But there also needs to more to the plot of the movie than the suggestion that we're all bound up in the glorious mysteries of the universe for it to be narratively interesting, and more visually than screen-saver like images of majesty.