Biutiful

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

(R)

**

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“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.