Reviewed by Tim Wong

IGNORING for a moment the tedium of Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga’s insistence on doing things in threes, Babel is a bold, throbbing minor miracle, and their strongest work as a collaboration to date. Removed from the frizzle of Amores Perros and the hysteria of 21 Grams, this intercontinental triptych bursts forth with a towering energy, replete with loud, tactile imagery and a nerve-wracking precariousness. The director/writer duo take their fascination with grand human tragedy and globalise it, mastering the scale of consequence between the film’s quartet of colliding stories, each intimate, unflinching, at times crushing. Its macro-narrative is also something to behold, densely populated with Big Themes and topical waypoints: rich white tourists gallivanting naively in the Middle East; the hyper-connectivity of technology as an alienating force; the spectre of George W. Bush’s proposed 700-mile fence between Mexico and the US. Not only does Babel cross that border several times, leaving its characters stranded and at the mercy of a harsh immigration policy, but it ushers in a new insurgence of Mexican filmmakers to the mainstream.