Babel. Revisited.

"There is no doubt that Babel is diligently following a recipe, and by the middle of the movie the rhythm of switching among stories has become so regular it almost creates a form of stasis - the way metronomic cross-cutting or long sequences of medium shots can make you feel a film has gone dead," writes Michael Wood in the London Review of Books. "But then the director pulls off a visual and aural tour de force, an amazing scene in a Japanese nightclub, the rhythm breaks up, and the movie finds its real energies."

Updated through 1/21.

Novelist Maggie Gee, writing at openDemocracy, is "impressed by the skill with which the film used traditional poetic patterning."

But the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw finds it "extraordinarily overpraised and overblown, a middlebrow piece of near-nonsense: the kind of self-conscious arthouse cinema that is custom-tailored and machine-tooled for the dinner-party demographic. The script is contrived, shallow, unconvincing and rendered absurd and almost meaningless by a plot naivety that is impossible to ignore once its full magnitude dawns on you."

"It is, in effect, this year's Crash," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "Study it closely and it rings hollow."

Related: Alejandro González Iñárritu in the London Times on making the film.

Update, 1/21: "Some will think this film glib and overly schematic," admits Philip French in the Observer. "I found it an impressive, beautifully acted work with a tragic sense of life. The formality of its structure controls a seething anger."

Posted by dwhudson at January 20, 2007 2:02 PM