Bad Education

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

A rapturous masterwork.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Bad Education is a voluptuous experience that invites you to gorge on its beauty and vitality, although it has perhaps the darkest ending of any of the films by the Spanish writer and director.

New York Post V.A. Musetto

From the Hitchcockian opening credits to the final frame, Almodovar has Hitch on his mind.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

Almodóvar has created a dense, audacious film in which layers of cinematic artifice lovingly camouflage (at least for a while) its characters’ dark, damaged heart.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

This is a brilliantly structured hall of mirrors that wraps Catholicism and the movie industry into a tasty film noir.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

The result is one of Almodovar's darkest films since the early days of "Law of Desire" and "Matador," and certainly one of his finest.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

To watch Bad Education is to revel, along with Almodovar, in the power of cinema to take us on journeys of breathtaking mystery and dimension and beauty.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Bad Education, in this light, is Almodovar's "8-1/2" or "Day for Night," a lens through which all of his movies appear as a seamless whole. It's not the story of his actual life but, more excitingly, the deft, witty, bittersweet story of the life of his art.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

With Bad Education, the great Almodóvar delivers the finest movie of his career.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed.

The New Yorker David Denby

Complex and devious beyond easy recounting, Bad Education is about the fallout from the ending of a "pure" love between boys, consecrated in an Almodóvaran temple--a movie theatre.

Variety Jonathan Holland

Superbly orchestrated, visually impressive.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

It's the director's most complexly ordered film to date - a labyrinth of ids, egos and alter egos waiting around blind corners - and may be the movies' most deliriously inventive narrative spiral since "Adaptation."

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

With Bad Education, Almodóvar is at his most breathtakingly complex and mature, and at his most pessimistic.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Almodóvar has never been shy about experimenting with plot structure, but Bad Education is the closest he's ever come to a metamovie, the sort of self-reflective, hall-of-mirrors contraption on which Charlie Kaufman has built his career.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

In this cross between film noir and melodrama, there's lust, need, camp and betrayal.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

A masterful epic charting love's labyrinths.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Pedro Almodovar's new movie is like an ingenious toy that is a joy to behold, until you take it apart to see what makes it work, and then it never works again.

Chicago Reader Staff (Not credited)

If you're a fan of professional bad boy and Spanish gender bender Pedro Almodovar, far be it from me to dissuade you from enjoying this elaborate Chinese-box narrative, which boasts an especially resourceful performance by Gael Garcia Bernal.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

In accounting for Almodóvar's identity as an artist and a man, Bad Education comes together like a bold and far-reaching summation of his career to date.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Spain's most important living filmmaker isn't at his very best in this complicated tale, but it raises still-timely questions well worth pondering.

San Francisco Chronicle Carla Meyer

Intoxicating and flawed.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Even when the plots of sexual confusions, transgression and tragedy became absurdly complicated and arbitrary, there was always the mise-en-scène to die for.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

A big change of pace for the bad-boy Spanish director. Like his other work, it's kinky and proudly gay, but this time it's not a comedy. It's a serious neo-film-noir, and a pretty darn good one at that.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

By turns enthralling, seductive and deeply disturbing.

New York Magazine Ken Tucker

May be at once too gimmicky and too sincere. But it still exerts an uncanny power: Like the best of Almodóvar’s work, it throws you a first-love sucker punch that will stagger your heart, mind, and soul.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Ultimately, Bad Education must be considered to be a minor effort from a major director.

Chicago Tribune Robert K. Elder

If only Bad Education engaged the heart as much as the head, Almodovar's fractured tale might have risen above its alienating noir conventions.

Dallas Observer Melissa Levine

Begins as comedy, morphs into drama and only belatedly introduces the noir requisites of subterfuge, cunning and death--none of which, by that time, is necessary or even welcome. There is a great deal of life in this movie, and also promise, but its creepy ending betrays its sincere and painful core.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

There's something dull and evasive at the film's center--for one thing, contrary to its festival buzz, Bad Education tiptoes around the issue of priesthood pedophilia; lovelorn gazes are as desperate as it gets.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

After two flat-out triumphs in a row, "All About My Mother" in 1999 and last year's breathtaking "Talk To Her," Pedro Almodóvar hasn't done it again. Yet lesser Almodóvar -- in this instance "Bad Education" -- is better than most of the movies we see.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Leaves the viewer with the sense of a writing-directing talent concocting complexities. Everything he touches is well-turned, but he now feels compelled to put the pieces together in something other than a lucid design.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The movie gets as overblown and masochistic as the worst Joan Crawford vehicle. Its saving grace is that Bernal really does have his own deep-set, smoldering variation on Bette Davis eyes.

Film Threat Phil Hall

Such garbage that taking a shower at the Bates Motel is a more appealing alternative.