Bomb squad | 360 | On Demand

In a July 19 interview with British publication Little White Lies, director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) caused a stir by claiming that a festival review of his 360 was so vicious and “irresponsible” that it nearly prompted scripter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) to give up writing. That seems like an overreaction on all sides: The Guardian piece Meirelles referred to wasn’t so scathing, and the movie—a modern La Ronde that’s taken its time to see the light of day after a less-than-epochal premiere at Toronto last September—is not terrible enough to warrant the fuss. (Certainly it’s less of an embarrassment than the Morgan-penned Hereafter.)

Hopping from Bratislava to Vienna to London to Denver to Phoenix and back across the pond again, the movie and its cast (including Jude Law and Rachel Weisz as a struggling couple, Anthony Hopkins as a man searching for his estranged and presumably dead daughter, and Lucia Siposová as a Slovak woman who turns to Internet prostitution) examine amour in all its forms: unrequited love, faded love, love that lasts even after one person’s death and airport hookups with just-released sex offenders. What’s the point of this high-toned, derivative exercise? There doesn’t seem to be one. In essence, the film plays the same trick as something like 21 Grams: It substitutes structural gimmicks for anything approaching profundity. (Available on VOD now; see magsneaks.com for details.)