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Babel

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France, United States, Mexico · 2006
Rated R · 2h 23m
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu
Starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Adriana Barraza
Genre Drama

An American tourist in Morocco suddenly gets shot while on a tourist bus. As it turns out, it was a careless child who pulled the trigger of the rifle that belongs to his father. The aftermath of the accident touches off an interlocking story of four families on three continents revolving around the same gun.

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What are critics saying?

40

Village Voice by

Puzzle master Arriaga may be the Will Shortz of globalized hand-wringing, but the by-now-predictable jigsawing of his scripts reeks of desperation.

50

Newsweek by David Ansen

I might buy Babel if it had any real interest in its characters, but it's too busy moving them around its mechanistic chessboard to explore any nuances or depths.

50

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

In their last collaboration, "21 Grams," the director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga did syntactical acrobatics to disguise what a dreary and exploitive little soap opera they’d made. Their new movie, Babel, is more mysterious and less coherent.

88

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

Its complex (yet not mystifying) storytelling, forceful character development, and superb cinematography make this a candidate for one of 2006's best offerings.

67

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Measured in anything other than biblical cubits, the sum of Babel's many parts turns out to be a picture that suggests Americans ought to stay home and treat their nannies better.

100

Rolling Stone by Peter Travers

In the year's richest, most complex and ultimately most heartbreaking film, Inarritu invites us to get past the babble of modern civilization and start listening to each other.

90

The Hollywood Reporter by Ray Bennett

The filmmakers succeed brilliantly in weaving these stories together, taking time to explore depth of character and relationships. The suspense builds throughout as everyone involved becomes lost in a place they don't understand with people they don't know if they can trust.

80

Time by Richard Schickel

Babel is a movie that leaves you feeling limp and wrung out, but mysteriously moved by its vivid human encounters with the hot, tightly wired, chancy and coincidental world, ever capable of terrorizing us when we least expect it.

90

Variety by Todd McCarthy

Effectively building dread and emotional tension as tragic incidents triggered by human stupidity and carelessness steadily multiply, this film, like "21 Grams" in particular, employs a deterministically grim mindset in the cause of its philosophical aspirations, but is gripping nearly all the way.

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