I don't know which would be my top ten.
I saw "Babel" last night and liked it ever so much, though.
I'll give a little review of it.
*warning: contains spoilers*
It's sort of like "Crash", but broader (global) in scope.
It is four intertwined vignettes- an American couple on a vacation in Morocco; their two small children, left at home with the illegal immigrant mexican nanny/housekeeper; a Moroccan goat herder and his two pre-teen sons; and a rebellious, deaf Japanese teenager, who lives alone with her wealthy father after the recent suicide of her mother.
It all comes together because the Moroccan goat-herder buys a high-powered rifle from a neighbor, Hassan, and gives it to his boys to take with them while they tend the goats, so they can kill jackals, which prey on the goats.
The boys start idly fooling around with the rifle, and ultimately shoot at a tour bus which is driving by far below (they are up on a mountain with the goats). The feeling is that the boys don't intend to hurt anyone; they almost seem not to realize that there are people in the bus, or that shooting a gun at the bus could hurt someone.
The American couple, however, is on the bus, along with a bunch of other European and American tourists, and the wife is shot in the collarbone/ neck.
When the Moroccan goat-herder boys see the bus pull off the road and hear the screams, they realize what they've done. They get scared and run away, telling no one what happened.
Meanwhile, back in America, the Mexican nanny who is watching the couple's kids wants to attend the wedding of a family member in Mexico, and can't find anyone to keep the kids for her. So she decides to take them with her to Mexico.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, this deaf Japanese girl Cheiko is pretty much going nuts because she's mentally unbalanced from witnessing her mother's suicide, and also because she wants to fit in with her peers and be attractive to men, but people avoid her when they realize she's deaf.
It develops that Cheiko's father has been investigated in the death of her mother, and is still under suspicion.
Switching back to Morocco, the wounded American woman is taken to a small nearby village, and treated by a primitive "doctor" who stitches her wound with a needle and thread, and given hits off an opium pipe for the pain.
The husband somehow manages to contact the US Embassy, who can't come right away (can't remember why; maybe they can't find the village, or something).
Glimpses of television show that the US government holds the shooting to be a terrorist act. The Moroccan police are seeking the shooters.
The Moroccan police trace the rifle to Hassan, the neighbor who sold it to the goat-herder and his sons. After being beaten by the authorites, Hassan confesses that the rifle was once given to him as a gift by a Japanese man, who was part of a tourist group led on a hunting expedition by Hassan.
Hassan tells the police that he sold the rifle to the goat-herder.
Meanwhile, the goat-herder's sons confess to their father what they've done. The father takes them and the rifle and runs away, minutes before the police arrive at his home.
While all this is going on, the Mexican maid has taken the children to the wedding in Mexico. Afterward, she is being driven back to San Diego by a wild, drunken nephew with the children in the backseat, when they are stopped at the border by the American authorities. She does not have the appropriate papers to have taken the children out of the country, and is in trouble. The nephew, rather than risk arrest, suddenly speeds away, with the police in pursuit. He ends up in the middle of the desert, and forces his aunt and the two children out of the car, promising to come back for them later. He never does come back, though. Left alone in the middle of the desert, the maid and the two children are quickly dying of dehydration and heat stroke.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, the girl Cheiko intends to try and seduce a young policeman who has been pursuing her father. She invites him up to her apartment with a promise of "information about her mother's death".
Once in the penthouse apartment, the policeman notices photos on the wall- photos of Cheiko's father on a hunting trip, presenting the gift of a high-powered rifle to his Moroccan tour guide, Hassan.
Because the incident of the American woman shot by "terrorists" has now been globally publicized, the policeman recognizes the importance of this immediately. The implication is that Cheiko's father will be charged with providing weapons to terrorists.
A lot of other stuff happens; each story eventually gets resolved in its own way.
The most effective device of the movie is that it is occasionally without any sound at all, which allows us to both experience Cheiko's isolation as a deaf person, and also understand the futility of people trying to communicate who do not share a common language (for example, the American couple in the primitive Moroccan village where the woman is taken after having been shot, or the Mexican maid, rescued from the desert finally, trying to explain to the white, non-Spanish-speaking officer in hysterical, ineffective, broken English where she has left the dying children so that she could seek help).
It's a good movie. It's a little cold and impersonal; it doesn't have the "these-are-the-people-in-your-neighborhood" feeling of "Crash". You don't feel like you could know most of the characters in this movie. The characters are, by in large, not people we can relate to or identify with in most ways. They are from diverse cultures. But I think the movie very effectively gives us glimpses of what it would be like to be a different person, in a different culture.
The portrait of the deaf girl Cheiko, her social isolation and pain, is particularly effective, although she is one of the more peripheral (to the plot) characters in the movie.
The ending is good, and the whole "terrorism" thing (how an international "terrorism" threat is spun from a simple incident involving a couple of nine- or ten-year-old boys playing with a rifle, and how it ultimately sucks in people from many different countries) is... scary, to say the least. Maybe not realistic. I hope not.
