Life begins and ends in the opening moments of Terrence Malick's hypnotic The Tree of Life, and then it begins and ends again. The universe, imagined here in peerless CGI compositions and landscape shots of such distinct clarity as to turn the makers of Planet Earth green with envy, is in a constant state of dithering and delighting, expanding and exploding, rising and relenting. The notoriously reclusive Malick uses these images, accompanied by pieces by Bach, Mahler and Holst, as a mere overture. A raptor spares the life of a young, weak brachylophosaurus while cells divide, collide, and coalesce into human life, which takes on the shape of the O'Brien clan, a family of five living in a suburb of Waco, Texas in the fifties, where a fog of DDT and the sight of a slender beauty's nightgown become totems of the transcendentally unsettling adolescence of the eldest O'Brien child, Jack (Hunter McCracken).

Shards of the O'Briens' lives, most pointedly the loss of one of their three boys at the age of 19, preface Malick's symphony of time and light and climax in the now, with the brief introduction of Jack, fully grown and embodied by Sean Penn. Jack as a man lives and works in new towers of light, glass, metal, and stone. These buildings are cathedrals meant to defy time, and Malick's film very well may do the same as it heads off into the ages. This has certainly been the case for the writer and director's past films, which have come in at an excruciating pace that averages out to about one a decade. Malick's quiet, poetic sense of cinema, however, is such that the five films he has completed have put him in the same class of working American filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Frederick Wiseman. His debut, Badlands, remains one of the key American works of the 1970s.

His subsequent features are, among other things, masterpieces of tonal precision, with the arguable exception of The New World, which is, at the very least, a very beautiful film. Malick's personal sense of style molds and looms over all of these works but The Tree of Life is, as has been widely noted, his most personal film by quite some margin. His father worked for a large petroleum company as a geologist, a career at least tangentially akin to Mr. O'Brien (a phenomenal Brad Pitt, who also serves as producer here), an engineer perpetually frustrated by his failings as an inventor. Indeed, Malick himself here seems in the ethereal between the familiar mechanics of cinema as a form and the inventiveness of liberated art, though it's hard to imagine his outlook being anything as tough and bleak as the future that Jack's father sees for his sons. Mr. O'Brien is a strict, domineering presence in his home, with the disposition of a summit of dark clouds pregnant with thunder, whereas his wife (the utterly enchanting Jessica Chastain), with her hair the color of orange marmalade, is a nurturing, open and forgiving influence on her children.

Words are spoken by these characters, but they are also whispered in voiceover, appearing suddenly out of the dense thicket of sound that supervising sound designer and editor Craig Berkey has woven, mixing a Gorecki sonata with the implacable hum of a sweet summer night and an unassuming, magnificent chorus of boys' laughter and shouts. As much as Tree of Life may be an essential piece of cinema, its true meaning impossible to pinpoint and its mysteries doubling over on themselves within a single shot, it is also a minefield of dichotomies, not the least of which is Berkey's ocean of percolating, nuanced noise, topped off by Alexandre Desplat's towering score, and Malick's astounding collaborative work with the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who worked on The New World as well. The visual schema is just as ravishingly mixed as the sound, especially in its stunning use of effects, crafting moments of moving transcendent grace, the most memorable of which features Mrs. O'Brien floating, twirling, rolling in the air as dusk settles in on her neighborhood.

That moment of aerial ballet is tied as much to Jack's memory as it is to the vibrant balance Malick strikes between metaphysics and nature, adolescence and adulthood, celestial masses and earthbound landscapes, fathers and mothers, light and darkness, life and death. The director's ambitions are innumerable and ultimately insurmountable -- which is why, despite my great appreciation and love for the film, I cannot say that it is a masterpiece on par with Malick's first three works. Whether it may be an optimist's response to 2001: A Space Odyssey or a Christian fable relocated to the American south and played out with operatic grandeur, The Tree of Life is nevertheless an event, not to mention a stunning reminder of the power of the big screen in the age of VOD. To truly give into Malick's film, which some may find impossible or unreasonable, one must be overwhelmed by its images and its inherent mysteries; like all of Malick's films, it outright demands multiple viewings. And even if The Tree of Life, fresh off its Palme d'Or win at Cannes, is a textbook example of style-over-substance, as many of its detractors have argued, it is a tremendous exercise in style, anchored by the finest performance Brad Pitt has given to date. For this reviewer, however, witnessing Malick's vision of eternal life obliterated me almost immediately, only to eventually return me to a corporeal state, just in time for the closing credits.             

The title of Radu Mundean's superb fourth feature, Tuesday, After Christmas, suggests that something has been planned or, more pointedly, that a decision has been made -- but one of an intimate nature rather than of major historical importance. What we know is that it is impending, that whatever has been planned for that day has been set and was agreed upon by at least one party. There is no year mentioned, and the only way we know the season and the month is because of the titular holiday. Indeed, the story being told here -- that of an affair blooming into a something more and a marriage that has come to its end -- is largely devoid of a time period because it is a story that any adult knows all too well, either from their own experience or from the confessions and actions of those close to them.

That should not be taken as a sign that the Romanian director and screenwriter lacks ambition or that anything in his film is at all expected. In fact, Mundean, who co-wrote the film's script with Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu, deals in a sort of dramatic naturalism that eschews and diffuses exposition at nearly every instance. Catharsis is traded in for a slow burn of anger and emotional devastation pointed not at an archetypal bored husband, nor a fetching, flirtatious "other woman", nor an emasculating she-witch of a wife, but rather a person who has fallen madly in love with someone new. Indeed, Mundean restrains any judgment on his characters' morality or "rightness" to focus on the interior lives of his three major characters and allusions to a vast network of complex relationships that are just as complicated as the central love triangle.

This particular sticky situation, however, is spurred when Paul (Mimi Branescu) brings his daughter to get her teeth checked out and meets her orthodontist, Raluca (Maria Popistasu). We never see this scene, nor do we see how they fell into their affair, who made the first move or what excuses Paul made for her smell on his clothes and the hickies on his neck. Mundean begins his film as Raluca and Paul lie in bed, five months into their secretive romance, speaking playfully about his cock size and his struggles with smoking. The director, collaborating with his regular DP, Tudor Lucaciu, favors long takes, a challenge which the actors consistently rise and respond to, but cuts more when dealing with scenes between Paul and his wife, Adriana (Mirela Oprisor). Nevertheless, Oprisor is perhaps the strongest of this resolutely excellent cast, handling scenes of domestic stagnation with the same seeming ease as the more dramatically eruptive scenes that come towards the end.

Unlike most films that have dealt with adultery, Tuesday, After Christmas doesn't have much of a central, structured plot. When we meet these characters, they are merely on the cusp of making decisions for their future, many of which are seemingly minor. For Paul, it largely orbits around the question of what he will be doing for New Year's and where he will be; he wants to be with Raluca but he is planning on taking a ski trip with his family, and then spending time with friends and family. Raluca's trip to visit her mother stirs her feelings about Paul, which in turn causes Paul to make an impromptu decision to go meet her, leading to Paul's ultimate decision as to what to do in the situation.

Though the film exhibits many facets that are essentially theatrical, it would be foolish to disregard the importance of Mundean's largely immobile camera and his compositions. What Paul ultimately yearns for is an intimacy that has been lost in his very public life with his wife; you'll notice that doorways are accentuated throughout, but especially so when Paul and his family are together, with someone often looking in or performing general business in the background. Almost every scene featuring Raluca and Paul alone is closed off, away from prying eyes and the tediousness and openness of his relationship with his wife.

The seeming plainness of the film itself hides a sense of deep humane understanding: When Raluca and Paul talk about how much they love one another, there is no sense of the wool being pulled over anyone's eyes, or that a plot is being hatched. They are two people in love who make a decision together, and Mundean refuses to portray either of them as cold or uncaring of the situation they find themselves in. It is understandable that this might be misconstrued as laziness or a questionable experiment in stylized realism but it smacks of a sincerity that tales of adultery tend to chuck in favor of easy genre mechanics, absurd psychology, or flashes of eroticism that never quite stick. The beauty of Tuesday, After Christmas is in the details and what they insinuate -- whether it's a bitter conversation between Paul and his wife's sister, or a watch Paul gives to Raluca, one that makes her face glow from tender memories that to us are only vapor trails. 

AKA Marti, dupa craciun