Critic Reviews

360 has a circular structure that's deftly pleasing, though the human drama is just facile enough to make it seem, in the end, a little too much like connect the dots played with people.

Meirelles, who made the exciting "City of God" and "The Constant Gardener," has visual flair to burn. But he's less comfortable with inner lives than he is with feverish physical motion, and though the film is meant as a meditation on love and the post-modern psyche, it's shot like a thriller.

It is disappointing (and a little boring). The chief problem relates to structure. The film unspools more like a puzzle than a cohesive narrative.

La Ronde 2011-style is simply a game and its makers expert gamesmen. The film is never less than intriguing. But the artifice shows all too clearly.

The reason director Fernando Meirelles' intimate drama 360 succeeds where other adaptations of Arthur Schnitzler's 1897 sexual circle-back play "La Ronde" haven't is, ironically, because it puts less emphasis on body heat and more on intellectual coolness.

If the film had not been afraid to go a little darker (like its sexually frank opening), dig a little deeper, and develop its characters beyond their stereotypes, it would have been a much stronger effort.

Fittingly for its occasional ring imagery, 360 is hollow in the middle.

To their credit, both Meirelles and his cast infuse as much realism into the artifice as they can muster, but it's not nearly enough. The too-neat script boxes them in, and leave us out. In that sense, 360 doesn't so much connect our shrunken world as strangle the life from it – the circle feels like a noose.

No scene lasts more than a few minutes, but the overall is effect is being subjected to 105 mins. of YouTube vignettes that someone has chosen. 360 is probably best appreciated or endured on a long flight similar to the one Hopkins takes in the movie.

Much like its own characters, it dithers too much - and it dares too little.