Do you think Terrence Malick is in the same league as Stanley Kubrick?

No, I do not. If this question was perhaps asked after the release of The Tree of Life, I could mount a fairly persuasive case to rank him alongside Kubrick. However, Malick's work post-Tree of Life, whilst ambitious, experimental and unconventional, is of a seriously flawed and imperfect character. While I can appreciate Malick's current avant-garde approach, his last three films are way too excessive in their repudiation of traditional filmmaking convention. Quite simply, his post-Tree of Life work demonstrates that a film needs structure, no matter how much one wants to radically subvert the rules of filmmaking. You can simply not make a film that consists of nothing more than sporadic (yet beautiful) imagery, unmatched (yet lovely) music and random (yet talented) actors wandering and floating around gorgeous landscapes for two hours and not have some type of problem with it.

What Malick's previous films (namely, Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line & The Tree of Life) did well was tell a story, employ a cohesive structure yet still have room for experimentation, whether visually, narratively or editorially. He found the right balance. Contra his other work, Malick seems to neglect a concentrated effort for storytelling and instead attempt to make something akin to a montage, a music video, where there is no real script and no real direction. Malick's later films feel too postmodernist. They do not have cohesion nor structure nor an story or 'narrative' to tell. They are just floating about, doing their own thing, and frankly, I can not stand it.

No way

I can comment on two films of each director, and would put the two, without a doubt, on equal par of filmaking innovation and brilliance.
When 2001 came out, it was like.nothing you' d ever seen before. I had the same reaction to Tree of Life. Both were visually powerful and beautiful. Scenes that were visually indelible (to this viewer, anyway) were more important as the plotting device than the storyline itself. One takes place in the time and space that is behind or before us; the other seems to evolve in the spaces and landscapes that flow by you as if from a moving car , which you glance at too quickly in between the moments the high action of one life. The plots were mysterious and perhaps not entirely grasped by the audience, but depth and meaning was conveyed by the visuals. They were both mesmerizing movies I would easily watch again . On the basis of those two films alone, I give great merit to the two directors.