As I see it, it is a fairly typical art-movie, which is in no way built on story as most american movies are... It is more like disjointed dream-like flash-backs of events in Cuaron's past and then painted on the cinematic canvas in extremely beautiful images. Closest american movie resemblance might be something like "The Tree of Life" by Terrence Malick. Of course there are plenty of european movies that also works like this - Kieslowski and Andrei Tarkovsky come to mind.