Alejandro González Iñárritu and his regular writer, Guillermo Arriaga, are to the fractured, interlinked tale as M Night Shyamalan is to the twist ending. And in both cases, diminishing returns are setting in fast. Where Amores Perros was an electrifying, thrilling trip around dogs and car crashes and 21 Grams a more self-conscious but absorbing multi-layered tale, Babel comes over as a long, pretentious wallow in grief and misunderstanding, which could have benefited from losing at least one of its four strands (preferably the Japanese one).

The linking object this time is a rifle and a far-fetched tale sees it affecting lives on four continents and four separate tragedies. It's your chance to see Brad Pitt do some serious emoting over the shooting of wife Cate Blanchett - in a thankless, blood-spattered role - and he does a good job, but maybe the time has come for a parting of the ways of director and writer: Arriaga's screenplay for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, with first-time director Tommy Lee Jones, was superior in every way to this overblown piece and made far better use of the duo's home country, Mexico, to boot.