Biutiful
Javier Bardem plays a low-level Barcelona criminal for whom life is one misery after another, even when he tries to do good.
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
(R)
**
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
“Few actors have faces that project sorrow more completely” than Javier Bardem, said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. In this contender for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Bardem plays a low-level Barcelona criminal for whom life is one misery after another. He’s dying of cancer, the mother of his two young children is a bipolar prostitute, and every time he attempts to simply “do something good,” more pain results. As “amazing” as Bardem is, this latest film from the director of 21 Grams and Amores Perros is “so gloomy that you’re not sure whom to recommend it to,” said Mary Pols in Time. I left the theater feeling “slightly abused, as if there were some underlying narrative sadism at work.” Biutiful is actually nothing more than a “lower-depths urban version of the Passion,” with Bardem as the suffering Jesus, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. The tension between the director’s “exacting,” sometimes exhilarating craft and “his resolutely banal ideas” makes the movie a tweener: It’s probably too visually daring for Lifetime audiences but too softheaded for the arthouse crowd.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Georgia's new foreign influence bill
Under the Radar Critics claim the 'Russian law' could stifle dissent and wreck the country's chances of joining the EU
By Elliott Goat, The Week UK Published
-
'Making a police state out of the liberal university'
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
By Harold Maass, The Week US Published
-
8 looming climate tipping points that imperil our planet
The Explainer New reports detail the thresholds we may be close to crossing
By Devika Rao, The Week US Published