The Quiet Earth, directed by a New Zealander who made a number of B movies in the 1980s, gets closer to the mystery of life than The Tree of Life. Indeed, the famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson calls The Quiet Earth one of the greatest science-fiction films ever made. Its beauty and its profundities are all accidental. One could never repeat an effort like The Quiet Earth; it stands alone in a universe that seems to be itself completely an original. But you could have hundreds, if not thousands, of The Tree of Life. It turns out that the weirdest flowers and shrubs grow best in the soil of B movies. This weirdness comes very close to the way we sense that life is itself very weird. If there is a god, he/she will be much closer to a B-movie director than a philosopher king.

Read the full review. by Charles Mudede