Editor’s note: The Daily’s video reviews are intended to feature motion pictures that the average movie-going audience may have skipped at the theater. They are generally art, foreign or indie films that would be appealing to a college audience looking for more than the latest blockbuster.

I think it is safe to say that “Amores Perros” was blown away last year by “Crouching Tiger, Hidden You-Know-What” in the best foreign picture category in last year’s Oscars. But for those who have patience for more than one foreign film a year, it is worth checking out.

Saying that “Amores Perros” is the Mexican “Pulp Fiction” is a useful orienting description. To be sure, similarly interlocking nonlinear story elements are present, and it is streaked with Taratinian violence and seediness.

But those looking for director Alejandro Inarritu’s underworld dwellers to banter about fast food and the metric system or win twist contests will be sorely disappointed. These criminals are decidedly not hip. In fact, you will struggle to find a single character in the movie to sympathize with, even among the dogs.

But don’t worry. Bad things happen to all of them.

A violent car crash opens the film and serves as the nexus of three subsequent stories. Tonally and thematically, the stories are an apt trio, but no essential plot elements necessitate their enmeshment. Like “Pulp Fiction,” or, more recently, “Magnolia,” “Amores Perros” takes a few different yarns of roughly short-story magnitude and interweaves them, presenting the audience with an exercise in cinematic multitasking as we simultaneously piece together the different stories.

The first of these stories, titled “Octavio and Susana,” focuses on a couple brothers and their struggle for the love of Susana, the elder’s wife. Younger Octavio, who lives with the couple, witnesses the brutality his brother Ramiro casually administers to Susana, and shares in the burden of his despotism. He plots an escape for himself and Susana, assuming that she will love him if he is bold and provides an alternative to the pure evil of his brother. Money for the retreat is to come from dog fighting the family pet, Cofi, who turns out to be a real bruiser.

The pair make a load of cash, but when their chief opponent gets tired of losing, Octravio and Cofi get a harsh reminder that, in a dog fight, anything goes. What’s worse is that in his delusions of heroism, he has failed to notice that his overtures on Susana have gone nowhere, unlike his cash.

Susana says at one point in the film “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” From the divine perspective, the characters in “Amores Perros” must be hilarious.

We jump at this point to “Daniel and Valeria,” which is the most fanciful of the three tales and the strongest in its characters’ poetic undoing. Valeria is a Mexican supermodel and Daniel is the lover she has just seduced, at long last, away from his family. Immediately after laying the foundations for their new life together, Valeria is badly injured in the movie’s central auto accident. The physical damage is pretty nasty, particularly for a supermodel, but the two of them still have each other and optimism prevails.

That is, until Valeria’s little dog, Richie, chases a ball down an open hole in their new apartment’s hardwood floor and doesn’t come out. “Richie! Richie!” she calls. In a perverse, but apt way, it is delightful to watch the shallow supermodel’s desperation for Richie’s return from the dark, rat-infested depths just below the surface of her posh new digs. In the management of the situation and each other, Valeria and Daniel’s glossy exteriors are quickly stripped away, exposing souls as infested as the apartment.

The final story picks up with Cofi, who has come under the care of El Chivo, an ex-revolutionary turned assassin for hire, who seems to care for dogs about as much as he neglects hygiene. Of all the characters in the film, El Chivo has come to the table with the most suffering for the choices in his life. When a corrupt cop comes to him with a hit to make for a aggrieved lover, it is left up to him to find the transcendence from dog-eat-dog that the rest of the film’s characters can’t.

The movie’s title translates to “Love’s a bitch” and fittingly, “Amores Perros” features dogs heavily. One of the movie’s central points is that people who choose bestial behavior over civilization – thieves, rapists, adulterers, murderers – fit themselves to suffer the consequences of a dog-eat-dog world.

In order to accomplish this symbolically, Inarritu associates a degree of savagery and violence with dogs that many viewers will find upsetting. As assurance to those bound to feel that way, it is stated at the beginning and end of the movie that no animals were harmed in its production.

Don’t expect anyone in the movie to escape unscathed, though. In “Amores Perros,” every dog has his day.

Luke Thompson is a senior in English from Fort Dodge.