Crash

Crash (2005) follows several stories touching each other across a day and a half in Los Angeles, all of them about race. A district attorney and his wife are robbed. A policeman stops a couple and searches the woman. A shopkeeper changes his lock and does not trust the locksmith. A director is angry that his wife did not defend him. The stories are joined by a collision and a series of coincidences. The method is that every character behaves with prejudice at one point and is the victim of someone else's at another. The policeman who behaves worst performs the film's most selfless act. It won the best picture Oscar, one of the most disputed results in the award's history. It won in a year when Brokeback Mountain was the favourite, and the decision has been criticised ever since. The core of the criticism is that the film treats racism as a personal flaw and a chain of coincidences rather than something structural, softening it into everyone being a little racist and a little good. Paul Haggis said years later that it did not deserve to win. The screenplay came out of a robbery he experienced himself. The cast is very large: Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Terrence Howard, Thandiwe Newton and more. A rescue and a scene involving a cloak are the most remembered moments. It runs 112 minutes. Good for: multi strand narrative, performance, and the mid two thousands. Less good for: the density of coincidence strains belief and the message is delivered too plainly.