Running time: 138 mins. Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Tye Sheridan, Laramie Eppler, Fiona Shaw, Irene Bedard, Jessica Fuselier. Director: Terrence Malick.

In a career spanning almost four decades, Illinois-born film-maker Terrence Malick has directed just five films, which have all been nominated for or won cinema’s glittering prizes including the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Golden Bear from Berlin.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Malick doesn’t feel any pressure to court adulation.

But, in a business that churns out mediocre fare to satisfy the demand of popcorn-munching, multiplex audiences, Malick is a delicious anomaly.

If his 2005 historical drama The New World starring Colin Farrell fell short of lofty expectations, his latest impressionistic ode to human experience is a visually and aurally arresting triumph.

Threaded with soothing and poetic sequences of the natural world, The Tree Of Life is a film of long, haunting silences and apparent inactivity that glimpses fragments of Earth’s turbulent history.

A meteor strike sends devastating ripples across the surface of the planet, segueing into a child escaping from a submerged room, a metaphor for the birth of baby Jack in the 1950s Midwest.

The camera stays close to young Jack (Hunter McCracken) and his brothers RL (Laramie Eppler) and Steve (Tye Sheridan) as they suffer at the hands of their authoritarian father, Mr O’Brien (Brad Pitt).

Naturally the boys gravitate towards the compassionate and giving Mrs O’Brien (Jessica Chastain).

Meanwhile, in the present day, grown-up architect Jack (Sean Penn) feels disconnected from the jungle of cold, metallic skyscrapers that are now his home.

The Tree Of Life is unmistakably the work of Malick, eschewing a conventional narrative to conjure stunning images that linger in the memory.