MikePadgett.com

• Director: Guy Ritchie
• United Kingdom, 2000
• 

After Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels sold so well and Snatch showed that the grotty London gangster motif had mileage, Ritchie’s career seemed to go downhill fast. Perhaps it was because his limitations were exposed by unfamiliar material. Or maybe his vampire wife had taken too many creativity transfusions from him. Whatever the reasons for Guy Ritchie’s perceived decline, that perception may yet prove unfounded.

And lest we forget, before the hideous Swept Away and the dismissed Revolver all was grimy gold. Ritchie freely admits that much of the screenplay for Snatch comes from the leftovers of Lock, Stock and the two movies have been twinned ever since. So, having attracted Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro and Dennis Farina from across the pond, Ritchie gathered together most of his usual suspects and reinvented the wheel.

Among the many highlights of Snatch include Pitt’s beautifully rendered “pikey” accent, pop-eyed psycho cum East End thug Brick Top (Alan Ford), the late Mike Reid’s faux-Jewish family and yet another terrific soundtrack. There are nods here to Scorsese, De Palma and even John Woo. Time will tell if Guy Ritchie can return to take his place as an equal among them.

• Director: Steven Soderbergh
• United States, 2007
• 

From far away you can hear the overhead lines crackling across the desert as they stretch through the arid expanses of Nevada toward the mirage glow of Las Vegas. That crackling, it’s the sound of Messrs Clooney, Pitt, Damon et al phoning their lines in.

If you put a scene’s worth of frames from Soderbergh’s movies on the wall, they’ll look lurid like a Warhol screenprint, so it’s no surprise that the neons of Vegas make Ocean’s Thirteen an orgy of colour and the barely trying cast is obviously as dazzled by the bright artificial as Raoul Duke.

This is a poseur movie for boys and girls who like to watch the boys and girls go by: since while Sinatra, Martino and the junior Davis brylcreemed their way through five casinos royale, these 21st century cruisers of the modern middle age are just too slick to make it stick.

• Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
• US/Mexico, 2006
• 

I always look forward to a new instalment of the González / Arriaga filmmaking partnership. Babel is undoubtedly their grandest effort to date and it’s probably their weakest, but a flawed González movie is still extraordinary.

Babel has been described as the first film about globalisation: four stories from around the world interconnect to form a parable about love and consequences.

Whilst the narrative is uneven and binds together only with some difficulty, the whole product is visually thrilling and there are some stand-out performances, particularly in the Mexican sequences.