21 Grams | By David Levinson

BRANDISHING THAT big ol' hand-of-God sense of fatalism, Alejandro González Iñárritu sets out to consider Paul River's (Sean Penn) point that "How two people meet is a mystery bigger than us". Conflating glorified soap opera material with grim, ashen realism, 21 Grams, much like Irréversible, is a film that takes a simple narrative, disrupts it, and then wraps it around a philosophical conceit. Only, instead of wrenching his characters through agony to get to bliss, Iñárritu's shambled chronology – which merges the past, present and future – weaves them about a harmonic apex of life and death that finds itself falling in and out of balance as the core tragedy unfolds.

Reviewed by David Levinson

HAVING GONE FROM being the 'girl who almost ruined The Godfather 3' to one of America's foremost female auteurs within the span of three years is quite the feat in itself. Nevermind for someone who spent the greater portion of her life standing in the artistic shadow of her father. Sofia Coppola's metamorphosis began with the release of her ephemeral, sophomore effort, The Virgin Suicides, in 1999, and according to many, she now stands bearing wings of her own with her recently delivered second film, Lost in Translation – a wet dream of hotel ambience, insomnia, Kevin Shields, and perpetual night.