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90Biutiful has a strong, linear narrative drive. Nevertheless, and most of all, it's a gorgeous, melancholy tone poem about love, fatherhood and guilt.
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90Biutiful, which gets it name from a child's misspelling of the word, is in itself a beautiful, mesmerizing film and Iñárritu's masterpiece.
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88Biutiful is strong stuff, it will leave you shaken. There's poetry here, and catastrophe.
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88Bardem's soulful turn lends this haunting meditation a sense of hope and saves it from the contrived missteps it teeters toward.
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80It's Bardem's portrayal of his search for those answers that drives Biutiful forward.
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Jan 24, 201180Iñárritu has made a modern classical tragedy and, in Javier Bardem, he has found his first authentic hero; a character caught up in an intricate web of events he cannot extricate himself from.
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78As much as Bardem is an expressive instrument for parlaying Iñárritu's somber worldview, so too is cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, whose stunning compositions find the poetry amid the sorrow.
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75In this vast balloon of a film, Bardem is the ballast – that Manichean face is a movie onto itself.
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Jan 28, 201175Biutiful soars to its highest points once it shifts its focus away from death to ask us how we are choosing to live our lives.
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75Biutiful exists, at its best and beautifully, in that space that's hard to define, between the outside and the interior, action and thought, body and soul.
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75Surely few actors have faces that project sorrow more completely than Bardem.
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75Set on the seamy side of Barcelona, Biutiful may not be a feel-good movie for this time of year, but it's well worth your time.
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75Shot hand-held with a poet's eye by Rodrigo Prieto, the film is relentless but as riveting as the world a remarkable actor lets us see through Uxbal's eyes. Bravo, Bardem.
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70Nothing says "Awards Season" like feel-bad cinema, and with Biutiful, Iñárritu hauls out the big guns. He also, maddeningly, has one hell of a weapon in his star, Javier Bardem.
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70The hardest movies to review are the ones you respect and admire but don't love and also - and this is the crucial part - aren't angered by. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful is just that sort of film.
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67Yet another, albeit sparer, Iñárritu gloom-fest.
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63The saving grace of Biutiful is Bardem.
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63The movie wails in pain. And it's that sort of grand empathy that makes Iñárritu both impossible to dismiss and impossible to live with.
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63The movie is unwieldy and overstuffed with subplots - and, at 2 1/2 hours, probably too much misery and sorrow for most viewers.
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60Here, it's all Bardem, and this great actor's careworn face and sensitive presence counts for a lot. He ultimately can't save the soul of Biutiful, but he makes the journey easier.
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60Sometimes it seems as if Iñárritu is literally carving out his actor's heart, so tangible does Bardem make Uxbal's fears. Iñárritu has so much that he wants to say - too much, in fact, and the film's central weakness - that he has created an emotional tsunami for both the actors and the audience.
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60Mr. Bardem, best known to American audiences for his chillingly persuasive embodiment of evil in "No Country for Old Men," combines muscular, charismatic physicality with an almost delicate sensitivity, and this blend of the rough and the tender gives Biutiful a measure of emotional credibility that it may not entirely deserve.
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58It's a one-note character that Bardem builds into a complex emotional chord, lessening the urge to dismiss Biutiful solely as an endurance test for viewers.
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50It is raw, it is searing, it is honest.
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50Iñárritu does the actor no favors by putting him through the existential wringer every step of the way. Uxbal suffers for all our sins.
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50For many, this central performance will be more than enough. For others, the film will simply be too much.
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50Cinematographer Rodrigo Pietro grounds the ghostly encounters in grainy imagery, his unobtrusive handheld camera and deeply saturated colors best appreciated in a nightclub sequence that looks like something from Hieronymous Bosch.
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50The safe course is to recommend the film, which seems pitilessly long at 147 minutes, only for the transcendent quality of Javier Bardem's performance.
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50However much Uxbal tries to help Barcelona's dispossessed, Biutiful doesn't really have anything to say about the modern world's economic migrants. Indeed, it could even be said that the movie exploits them.
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42In spite of fine work from Bardem and Álvarez, Biutiful is an irritating, oppressive 150-minute dirge, not the step forward Iñárritu's dissolved partnership with Arriaga seemed to promise.
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30This forced march through a chamber of personal and sociological horrors is difficult to endure but easy to forget.
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20We've come to expect diminishing returns from the once-promising Mexican director who then gave the world "Babel," but the combination of wallowing humanistic-cinema overkill and outright ridiculousness he lays out here represents a new low. Biutiful is not a tragedy. It's a straight-up travesty.
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10Though its structure may be whittled down in comparison with the earlier works, Biutiful is even more morbidly obese than "Babel" in terms of soggy ideas, elephantine with miserabilist humanism and redemption jibber-jabber.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 18
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Mixed: 4 out of 18
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Negative: 2 out of 18
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Feb 27, 20115
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Feb 20, 20114