Set on the eve of war, Life in Five Acts is a multi-layered drama that, like Babel and Syriana, aims to be a time capsule of life as it's lived in the early 21st Century.

As the title suggests, the film - which features Greek dialogue with English subtitles - tells five different stories within a 20-minute running time. The first three - showing a father and son in a bomb shelter, a would-be terrorist saying goodbye to his mother and a soldier preparing for battle - are directly related to the plot. The fourth (about a drug addict) and fifth (about a husband caring for his pregnant wife) dramatize the everyday lives and deaths that will go on with or without war.

Not everything in the film works. I believed in the boy and his father, but the rest of the relationships on screen lacked the same lived-in quality. Too many scenes are set in boring interiors, and we're thankful when the film opens up in the final stretch to show us a highway surrounded by mountains.

Despite imperfections, Life in Five Acts is a mini-epic that often achieves towering heights. You won't be able to take your eyes off the bravura opening sequence, which consists of a single two-minute Steadicam shot. We see a couple playing in an outdoor market and a girl striking s*xy poses for a picture, and then we move into a courtyard where we witness a mugging. The sequence ends in a moment of pure cinema, as a conductor orchestrates jets of water to come out of a fountain.

Writer-director Mario Spiroglou saves his masterstroke for the film's final fade to black. We hear a baby being born. The infant's wailing cries are joined by the sound of civilians screaming, and then an air-raid siren drowns out everything. We've only seen a fraction of what this filmmaker is capable of.