Watts, Penn and Del Toro have all been brilliant before, and if we're lucky, they will all be brilliant again. But to watch these three -- working alone and in tandem -- is to experience the strange, at times frightening alchemy of screen acting.The ability to keep the multiplicity of stories and the interconnected timelines as focused as he does gives firm belief that we have a filmmaker well on the road to greatness.This film has great performances all around, especially from Naomi Watts in maybe her best role yet.

This movie is very, very good. Unlike some others I do not think the unchronological storytelling hurts the movie, on the contrary I think that the pieces that the viewer has to put together in order to get the picture of the whole story just make it more interesting.

On the other hand, no matter how good the movie actually is it is one step short of masterpiece. It is like you are climbing to heaven but you cannot make it over the last step. The story is good, the filming is good, the acting is good, but there is still SOMETHING missing for this movie to be added to my hall of all time faves. Maybe it is the music, this film does not have a strong score, maybe all the components do not add up well together... It is hard to describe why, but I was not as stunned as I usually am after watching movies I rate at 10.

Thus, I was deciding between 8 a 9, finally I voted 9 but it is a rather weak on

Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, becomes with " 21Grams" a master craftsman that can push psychological boundaries and proves that to understand the Americans, you don't have to be one. And very often foreign directors that tackle American psyche do so in an intelligent and often very accurate and sensible way. Even though this film could have had characters from any country. Of course this is the case with the director of this brilliant film. I had to see it twice under very different circumstances and both times i left with a profound satisfaction of watching a great film. The work of Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro , Naomi Watts and Charlotte Gainsbourg is superb. Overall for me, the best film of 2003