Then and Now. And Later.

Using "Babel" as a starting point, David Denby has some interesting thoughts on the current popularity of non-sequential narrative in "The New Yorker". (Read it quick; it won't stay on line forever.)
By the way, I share his suspicion of "Babel", a film which pretends to a kind of humanism while depicting almost all human behavior (except that of his primary protagonists) as brutal, uncaring and suspicious.