2. The Tree Of Life
Terrence Malick's prayer like examination of the universe and mankind's place within it, The Tree of Life is the magnum opus of arguably cinema's most consistently brilliant visual stylist. Many of Malick's films could have made this list but The Tree of Life is the best of the bunch. Containing a non-traditional narrative that is very challenging to understand on first watch, The Tree of Life juxtaposes a family in midwest America with the birth, life, and death of the universe. Similar to The Fountain, a limited amount of computer generated effects were used in The Tree of Life as legendary special effects supervisor Douglas Trumball (who also worked on 2001, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture) disliked how they looked. Trumball described the process used in the film by saying"We worked with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be...We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic." The Tree of Life primarily uses visuals to tell its story, necessitating near perfection from the filmmakers, luckily Malick and Trumbull delivered something special.