The beam propagation characteristics are investigated in nonlocal nonlinear optical lattice analytically. The reduced Lagrange density of nonlinear Schrdinger equation is obtained by expanding the real symmetric response function in Taylor′s series in strongly nonlinear Kerr media. The problem of beam propagation can be analyzed by a variational approach, and the equations of the beam width, amplitude, phase and other parameters of the trial solution are obtained for the evolution during propagation. The beam can be looked as a particle, and its critical power is found through analyzing the potential function. The soliton propagation can be controlled by changing modulation period, modulation depth and other parameters of optical lattice. This effect has potential applications in the fields such as controlled optical switches.