The title of this Tarantino-esque Mexican film, a recent nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (it lost to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), roughly translates into Love is a B---- and film certainly illustrates this concept, telling three Go-style stories that all involve dogs and a horrible car crash that opens the film.

The first tale, the story of a young man (Gael Garcia Bernal) who tries to raise money by dog-fighting in order to run away with his abused sister-in-law (Vanessa Bauche), is the best of the bunch, directed with fluidity and sharpness by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarrito.

Innarito's vision is painful at times, drawing a lot of its power from the corruption and inhumanity that drives Mexico City, but most of the scenes of violence and gritty realism are tempered with a wonderfully subtle sense of sentimentality.

The second two stories - one about a supermodel (Goya Toledo) with a powder-puff of a pooch who gets put in a wheelchair, the other about a homelessman/hitman (Emilio Echevarria) who cares more about his strays than the daughter he abandoned as a child - are less captivating than the first, but no less accomplished in terms of directorial vision or the dog-eats-dog nature that drives the characters.

Recommended: Yes