Not to be confused with the '80s movie of the same name about L.A. street gangs, Colors is basically a failed experiment, but it’s almost always fascinating and never dull. The same could be said for just about any omnibus movie ever made. There’s something about having different directors come together to work on the same film that almost always results in a train wreck. My theory is that movies need a single voice or a unifying vision, otherwise they’ll fall apart. This is true even when great directors collaborate, like when Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen made New York Stories or when Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar-Wai made Eros. The all-time worst anthology film is Four Rooms, which is such a hodgepodge of bad ideas and conflicting styles as to be nearly unwatchable.

Colors is nowhere near that bad, but it’s still scattershot. From the description, we learn that seven directors interpreted seven colors in seven different segments. I must admit that I sometimes had trouble telling where one segment ended and the other began. Only a few of the segments - the yellow one and the black-and-white one - use the color theme in a recognizable way. The others are more arbitrary and not visually distinctive in the way that the title would suggest.

The movie begins brilliantly. A man repeatedly throws his hat to the bottom of a stairway, and every time it somehow lands at the top. This is nicely wrapped up in the final scene, but the rest of the movie never quite lives up to that opening. There are some nice transitions - I especially like how the orange sequence ends and the yellow one begins - but I don’t see a unifying theme here. Now that these directors have proven they can hold our interest, they need to go their separate ways and start making movies the way God intended: one director per film, please. Two tops.