The film follows four (sometimes tenuously) connected stories. In the first, a Moroccan goat farmer gives his two young sons a rifle in order to defend the goats from jackals. The second sees a nanny and housekeeper take her two young (white) charges across the border from the U.S. to Mexico in order for her to attend her son’s wedding. The third story has Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett holidaying in Morocco when Blanchett’s character is suddenly shot through the window of a tourist bus. (See where this is going?) Finally, in Japan we’re given the story of a deaf teenager whose disability isolates her from her peers, resulting in a kind of confused, desperate form of sexual aggression.

There is no doubt that, technically, Babel is an excellent film. The performances are all stunning and González Iñárritu’s ability to place the audience within each environment means that the jigsaw puzzle presented is never confusing or disorienting. His respect for each culture shines through, and there’s a real sense of credibility to the overall flavour and atmosphere presented.

The stories themselves as individual pieces, meanwhile, are all quite gripping and somewhat suspenseful. Individual scenes, when taken in isolation, are fine vignettes that are colourful, dramatic or simply tragic, and at first it’s hard not to be swept away. Yet where Babel fails — and this is crucial — is that the whole seems less than the sum of its parts.

There’s a kind of pretentious attitude that runs throughout the film, as if there is some grand statement being made. But what is the real message here? That life is random and tragic? That suffering unites us? These sentiments are more trite than profound, and as each character is shuffled into position for another devastating blow to occur, the end result is one of rather transparent emotional manipulation.

Nonetheless, Babel is well made and well acted. It works best if you don’t actually stop to think about the point being made, instead allowing yourself to be enveloped by its textures. If nothing else, it sustains its lengthy running time.

On one level, American Gangster is the true story of the rise and fall of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a self-made man who became Harlem’s heroin kingpin in the 1970s by directly importing his product from Thailand and cutting out the middleman. Lucas was a true entrepreneur, applying a ruthlessly capitalistic philosophy to the drug trade — he undercut the competition (who just happened to be the Mafia) by offering twice the quality at half the price.

On a deeper level, however, the film is about police corruption. Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian seem to contend that dirty cops are even worse than the criminals they bully. Washington’s Lucas adheres to his own (albeit twisted) code of ethics — he will snap quickly and mercilessly at anyone who betrays his trust, but he only does what he thinks he needs to do in pursuit of his business goals. The sleazy Detective Trupo (Josh Brolin), on the other hand, has no honour, instead abusing his power in order to extort as much money as possible from the men he should be arresting. Trupo, it seems, is the real bad guy here.

Richie Roberts (Crowe), meanwhile, is caught in the middle. He’s a man who straddles both sides of the fence: staunchly moral when it comes to the temptation of corruption, he nonetheless associates with “wiseguys” after-hours because these were the friends he grew up with. Charged with tracking down the “big fish” in the drug trade, Roberts finds opposition mostly from the police who live off the kickbacks and don’t wish to see their sources of income disappear. And after all, Roberts was the man who (so legend had it) turned in $1 million in cash.

Scott’s ability to evoke the time and place in which the film is set is never out of balance, feeling both contemporary yet still of its time. The soundtrack is excellent, but the costuming in particular is a key part of the narrative: Lucas eschews the gaudy ’70s pimp-style outfit (a “clown suit” he remarks at one point), instead preferring a suit and tie in order to remain low-key. A distinction is clearly drawn between Lucas — a businessman who dresses appropriately — and the hedonists who simply wish to live (and die) to excess.

The performances are excellent. Washington is both charismatic and menacing as Lucas, while Crowe’s turn is more understated than usual but still passionate under the surface — his most surprising scenes are where Roberts fumbles in courtrooms due to his fear of public speaking.

What separates American Gangster from many other films in the genre are the parallels drawn by Lucas (and by extension, Scott and Zaillian) between American-style capitalism and his methods of drug distribution. At one point, he even discusses branding and trademark infringement, citing Pepsi and General Motors as examples. This was a forward-thinking businessman in an unconventional business.

This is perhaps not Scott’s best film, nor the best in the history of gangster/crime films, but it’s certainly one of the better examples of both.

The film opens with a protracted intro featuring an argument between apparently-in-love couple Holly (Swank) and Gerry (Gerard Butler) over a comment Gerry made to Holly’s mother earlier that evening. Rather than establishing how right for each other this couple is, this scene merely sets up the characters as being rather unlikeable and one-dimensional. The whole thing comes off as rather cliched.

After the opening credits, we find out that Gerry has since died of a brain tumour, and by the end of the first act, it’s been revealed that he’d created a scheme whereby Holly will receive a series of letters from him “beyond the grave” over the coming months. These letters, of course, are designed to ease Holly out of her grief and into a new life.

The main problem here is that the theme of dealing with grief isn’t really addressed in any kind of meaningful way. Sure, Holly’s mother (played by the always dependable Kathy Bates) admonishes her for not getting on with life, and Gerry’s letters at least get her out and active again, but Holly is so passive throughout that I didn’t ever feel that she really dealt with her sense of loss so much as coasted through it.

In the context of the story itself, the letters from Gerry actually seem strangely cruel. Although they do get Holly to participate in life again, it’s life with the spectre of Gerry hanging over it, whether it be a round of karaoke (just as she’d once done while he was alive) or a trip to his homeland of Ireland.

Of course, the real reason for the letters is to allow flashbacks detailing the romance between Gerry and Holly. It’s the transparency of this contrivance that lets the film down the most, and yet it’s the whole hook of the story.

This isn’t a bad film — it’s just rather flat. But with so many better films out there, I can’t see any real reason to recommend this one.

Hugh Jackman plays Tommy Creo, a research oncologist whose wife, Izzi (Rachael Weisz) is dying from a brain tumour. Parallel to this are two other stories: in one, Jackman plays Tomas, a Spanish conquistador who aims to assassinate Grand Inquisitor Silecio in order to protect his Queen (also played by Weisz); in the third, Jackman is Tom, a man hurtling through space in a spherical, translucent spacecraft. How these three stories relate to each other is one of the delights of The Fountain, and something that is best left for the film itself to reveal.

Writer/director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) has given us a film that possesses a depth of emotion and spirit few achieve. Its themes of mortality and grief are interwoven masterfully through its cinematic triptych as visual motifs recur again and again — the golden palette of the nebula featured in the third story, for example, is scattered throughout various scenes to remind us that these three stories are part of a larger whole.

Hugh Jackman and Rachael Weisz are both superb in their respective roles. Weisz gives Izzi a mix of strength and vulnerability that immediately rings true, while Jackman’s Tommy is a man driven but frustrated, myopic yet still totally lost and confused. I’m not sure as to how Pitt and Blanchett would have played these roles, but I just can’t imagine either giving such subtle and textured performances, as good as they usually are.

The score by Clint Mansell (who has collaborated on all three of Aronofsky’s films) pulses and flows like a meditation, with Aronofsky cutting between the three timelines seamlessly to complete the illusion. At first the transitions feel slightly jarring, but Mansell and Aronofsky create such a gentle, dreamlike pacing to the film that we instead feel carried along with the journey, experiencing the emotions while intuitively understanding the thematic relationships between the elements in the stories.

You can ponder and reflect on how the pieces of the film’s plot(s) all fit together after the fact, but the literal connections seem less important than the metaphorical unity. Tomas, Tommy and Tom are all on quests to challenge death, and they all come to similar realisations in their own ways, along their own paths.

At its heart, The Fountain is about the acceptance of death and the true nature of immortality. We live on in the earth, the grass, the trees, the flowers and the memories of those whose lives we’ve touched. So savour each moment with loved ones, because tomorrow those moments may be all you have.