Bad Education
Metascore
81 out of 100

Universal acclaim - based on 34 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 28 out of 34
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 34
  3. Negative: 1 out of 34
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  1. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
    100
    With Bad Education, the great Almodóvar delivers the finest movie of his career.
  2. Baltimore Sun
    Reviewed by: Michael Sragow
    50
    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.
  3. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    100
    This is a brilliantly structured hall of mirrors that wraps Catholicism and the movie industry into a tasty film noir.
  4. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Staff (Not credited)
    80
    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.
  5. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    88
    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.
  6. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Robert K. Elder
    63
    If only Bad Education engaged the heart as much as the head, Almodovar's fractured tale might have risen above its alienating noir conventions.
  7. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    75
    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.
  8. Dallas Observer
    Reviewed by: Melissa Levine
    60
    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.
  9. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    91
    It's a film noir that grows more potent as its secrets are revealed.
  10. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Phil Hall
    10
    Such garbage that taking a shower at the Bates Motel is a more appealing alternative.
  11. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Scott Foundas
    90
    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."
  12. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Carina Chocano
    90
    With Bad Education, Almodóvar is at his most breathtakingly complex and mature, and at his most pessimistic.
  13. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Rene Rodriguez
    88
    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.
  14. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jami Bernard
    88
    In this cross between film noir and melodrama, there's lust, need, camp and betrayal.
  15. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: Ken Tucker
    70
    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.
  16. New York Post
    Reviewed by: V.A. Musetto
    100
    From the Hitchcockian opening credits to the final frame, Almodovar has Hitch on his mind.
  17. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Carrie Rickey
    88
    A masterful epic charting love's labyrinths.
  18. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    100
    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.
  19. Premiere
    Reviewed by: Glenn Kenny
    100
    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.
  20. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    63
    Ultimately, Bad Education must be considered to be a minor effort from a major director.
  21. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    100
    A rapturous masterwork.
  22. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Carla Meyer
    75
    Intoxicating and flawed.
  23. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: William Arnold
    75
    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.
  24. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Scott Tobias
    80
    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.
  25. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    75
    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.
  26. The New Republic
    Reviewed by: Stanley Kauffmann
    50
    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.
  27. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Stephen Holden
    100
    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.
  28. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: David Denby
    90
    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.
  29. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    70
    By turns enthralling, seductive and deeply disturbing.
  30. Variety
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Holland
    90
    Superbly orchestrated, visually impressive.
  31. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Michael Atkinson
    60
    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.
  32. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    50
    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.
    All this critic's reviews
  33. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Desson Thomson
    100
    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.
  34. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Ann Hornaday
    100
    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.

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
7.8 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 52 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 27 out of 35
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 35
  3. Negative: 4 out of 35
  1. kublay0880
    4
    It's a good story it got me guessing the entire movie, but it's always the same thing with Almodovar a gay or a lesbian drama and lots of sex and naked people, sometimes it's just too much maybe a scene to set up the idea or the mood of movie. And personally I hate actors faking a foreign accent, yo don't need Gael to perform that character when you have so many real Spanish actors.… Full Review »
  2. RegOz
    8
    Personally, I believe this is an excellent movie! Unlike many people who love Almodovar, I don't always enjoy all his movies but this film is gold! A must in a list of a movie-lover!… Full Review »
  3. Voskhozhdeniye
    6
    This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view. It was too complex in that I could not understand what the film meant. I could not assemble it for myself to one striking meaning. The characters go off in different directions without taking me to one destination, so to speak.

    The use of the Super 8 was very clever (and disturbing). The mise-en-scene and lighting were often classic noir, direct. The metafiction and the emotion that followed were done well. Almodovar has a lot of ideas, but if we see a convergence of features in this work, or just a fireworks display of cinematography, I have to say the latter. But this is one of the most interesting films I have seen from a narrative structure point of view, and I would recommend others to see it. One gets the sense that this was a deeply felt film from the writer/director's point of view. I wonder very much how this work could be condensed, how this meta-fictional structure could apply elsewhere to a more powerful effect.    … Full Review »
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