15, 133mins

This is a big week for the Mexican diretor Alejandro González Iñárritu. His film Babel is the red-hot favourite to win Best Picture at the Oscars, and it completes the mighty trilogy of epics he started with Amores perros in 2000, followed by 21 Grams in 2003.

Babel is a stunning piece of cinema that hinges on one reckless moment of childish stupidity. The story is by no means perfect. It rattles alarmingly between characters and crises on three continents. Time slips backwards and forwards like a dodgy clutch. Entire reels are spent wondering how all these splinters add up. Yet Babel is still the most exhilarating Oscar contender by a long stretch.

The drama snowballs like a game of consequences. Two Moroccan peasant boys, testing out their father’s new hunting rifle, aim it at a distant bus and accidentally shoot an American tourist (Cate Blanchett) in the neck. Her frantic husband (Brad Pitt) forces the driver to stop at the nearest godforsaken village. The terrified passengers are eager to abandon the couple. The Arab locals don’t speak English and panicky Americans aren’t high on their list of favourite things.

Back home in San Diego, an elderly nanny takes the couple’s two young children on an ill-fated trip across the Mexican border. In Tokyo, a Japanese businessman - to whom the rifle originally belonged - grieves over his wife’s suicide while his deaf-mute teenage daughter looks for sex in nightclubs.

The doom is spread as thickly as marmalade. But there is nothing sweet about it. As the biblical title suggests, Babel explores the chilly cracks between people when links are unexpectedly broken: the gulf between adolescence and adulthood; the mistrust of foreigners; the sexism in far-flung Muslim communities.

The clash of cultures is reflected in the disparate choice of landscapes. The parched Moroccan desert frames the futility of Pitt as he screams down an ancient telephone for help and an ambulance. The bitter irony is that in a world bursting with technology we still fail to communicate at the most basic level. This is the legendary curse of Babel, and the topical tragedy of this terrific epic.

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