Popular reviews

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  Review by Lucy ★★★★ 5

  one gun... really fucked everything up and made everyone sad

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  Review by CinemaCl🎃wn ★★★½ 6

  From the director of Amores Perros & 21 Grams, Babel is the third & final chapter of Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu's Trilogy of Death which once again employs the multiple-narratives structure interconnected by a single event, further explores the prevalent themes of the last two chapters while adding a few more & features captivating performances from its much more diverse cast to finish the trilogy on an admirable note.

  Set in 3 different countries & interweaving 4 distinct plot lines, the story of Babel is triggered by a rifle bought by a Moroccan herder whose sons, while testing it, end up wounding an American woman who was vacationing there with her husband. When the two are unable to return home on time, their children's caretaker…

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  Review by DirkH ★★½ 4

  A film about language and communication would normally grab my interest immediately. For the better part of this film the sheer quality and topics of most of the separate stories managed to do just that. There is enough to enjoy here, with strong performances and interesting subjects.

  It is, however, also infuriatingly moronic in its contrived and forced narrative link. It makes a capital mistake in that it feels the incessant need to 'mean something'. It does so by force feeding us a link that is supposed to give the separate stories a common meaning/purpose. What it fails to recognise is that the stories by themselves manage to bring across the commonality just fine, keeping the uniqueness of their narrative and clearly distinct feel.

  It is extremely annoying that in its attempt to please its audience and naive need to tie up loose ends it fails to see the quality that is already there.

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  Review by Sam Meltzer ★★★★ 11

  Babel:
  - A bunch of stories that intertwine
  - Great acting
  - Great directing
  - Writing is precise and smooth
  - The script makes people sound like real people
  - Works well as an ensemble piece

  Crash:
  - A bunch of stories that intertwine
  - Fine acting
  - Horrible directing
  - Writing is messy and doesn’t make sense
  - The script is blatantly racist and no one sounds like a real person
  - Does not work well as an ensemble piece

  Pretty sure you get the point

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★½ 29

  What a load of wank. Babel adds up to nothing. Stuff happens, but nothing really happens, and it all means nothing. I would have called it pretentious wank but it's so empty I don't even think it's trying to say something.

  Alejandro González Iñárritu is a technical master as a director, but that simply isn't enough. His stripped back debut, Amores Perros, is easily his best work that I've seen. Yet in Babel his wizardry serves no purpose. The entire structure is artificial, and not in a way that adds value since it's meant to be a film of simple humanity. There's two great set pieces, one at a US-Mexico border crossing and another when a group of Japanese teenagers…

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  Review by Sam ★½

  Well over two hours of tedious misery porn all for some surface level message about communication. Attempts to go against the tourist or 'othering' gaze but inevitably ends up playing up cultural stereotypes, particularly in the Japanese segment which had the most ridiculous and tenuous connection to the overarching plot, existing solely to drag this monotonous dreck out far longer than necessary.

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  Review by paul a. ½ 11

  iñárritu further proving himself 2 be the master of crafting obnoxious, contrived af pieces of white elephant art by making something straight out of the farhadi school of radical "empathy" (read: having every character act as unreasonable as possible under the guise of investigating the human condition, when it's just an excuse to progress rote drama) instead of trying to examine how these events are triggered from the failures of neo-liberal international institutions. but that would actually take some level of formal talent beyond "have people shouting and crying and play some sad music; humanism."

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  Review by megan ★★★

  the world is ugly, but cate blanchett and brad pitt are beautiful to me

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  Review by lucy ★★★ 1

  i still stand by the fact that brad pitt is an underrated actor.

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  Review by Minty ★★★½

  The world is a shitty place and I honestly want no part in it.

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  Review by elliebean ★★★ 1

  hi and welcome to the museum of movie kisses! our first exhibit is: the kiss brad pitt gives cate blanchett while she pees in a pan

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  Review by The Oscar Expert ★★★★½ 2

  aka Good Crash