'The Burning Plain'? More like 'The Shattered Mirror Repaired By A Blindfolded Toddler'. Yes, following in the tradition of his 'Amores Perros', '21 Grams' and 'Babel', writer Guillermo Arriaga again shows flagrant disregard for the conventions of continuity and linear storytelling.

With the bleak narrative leaping repeatedly ? and seemingly randomly ? between separate, apparently unrelated, stories, initial progress is always slow and mildly frustrating. But as more shards are swept up and pieced together, the cracked reflection gradually becomes clearer.

The distinguished manager of an upmarket restaurant does somehow have something to do with those humble crop dusters in Mexico and that white trash family living out in that nowhere desert town.

This time though, the results are less rewarding. With Arriaga behind the camera for the first time, 'The Burning Plain' lacks the daring visual style and bold confidence director Alejandro Gonzalez I?arritu lent its predecessors. Playing more like a terribly edited Hallmark film instead, it nevertheless showcases some strong performances.

Charlize Theron, portraying essentially a self-mutilating suicidal slut, is lumped with all the cliches of a-woman-with-issues. But with a quietly restrained, barely-there performance focused on her vacant, haunted eyes, she adds refinement, humanity and real suffering to the broad strokes of the character.

Kim Basinger, long past her femme fatale prime, is simultaneously sympathetic and selfish as the bored housewife whose husband's neglect is mirrored in her neglect for their children.

And Jennifer Lawrence, as the eldest daughter, is an equally complex contradiction of responsibility and reckless rebellion.

It's these three women, and not Arriaga's storytelling, that light up 'The Burning Plain'.

From another angle: Zoopy 'On Screen' review