Crash (2005)

Review from imdb
Volatile Redemption

"Crash" is a complex movie with a simple premise: set in Los Angeles it follows 8 main characters (and many, many more supporting) from all walks of life and races whose lives intersect at some point during one 24 hour period. These people are all different yet all alienated, to the point of breaking, so much so that when they come together, things explode.

The complexity of the film comes from the encounters between characters and their tangled lives and worlds. Haggis' screenplay is so intricate and delicately written I couldn't begin to try to summarize the...more

Review from ./ericdsnider.com
The Los Angeles of "Crash," a moody drama of intersecting characters and stories, is an exaggerated one in which everybody is racist. Whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians and Middle-Easterners, all ethnicities hold prejudices against all the others. The action takes place over two December nights in L.A., as several stories are established so that they can collide later. The district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his wife (Sandra Bullock) are carjacked by two black men, Anthony (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) and Peter (Larenz Tate). Anthony is the senior, fight-against-the-White-Man partner, while Peter is young and naive enough to believe they are stealing because it...more

Review from ./moviepie.com
Sometimes, great films are buoyed by great performances. Sometimes, great performances are only a few minutes long. Such is the case with Crash, a compelling, multi-storyline, ensemble drama, along the lines of Magnolia or Laurel Canyon, that deals with a group of Los Angelinos struggling with a singular, central theme. The theme in question this time is race relations, and the resulting stories are, not surprisingly, highly charged, emotional and thought-provoking. Three stories make up the core of the film, and the players are, either directly or peripherally, involved in one or all of them. Story #1 is a car-jacking....more

Review from ./slantmagazine.com
n an episode of Comedy Central's now-canceled Upright Citizens Brigade, a video store employee is harassed by a lunatic customer who claims that he spoke the "titular line" in numerous Hollywood blockbusters (e.g. "Boy, I'm just so tired of all these star wars"). The skit, in deliriously bizarre fashion, encapsulates the distracting pointlessness of having characters speak a film's title in dialogue, and unfortunately, Paul Haggis's Crash starts right off committing this cinematic peccadillo. After a beautiful credit sequence in which disembodied headlights float through the dark night, Don Cheadle's detective Graham begins Haggis's ensemble piece by musing, "In L.A., nobody...more