- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
Powerful, profound and beautifully rendered.
-
90In The Burning Plain, another directorial debut, sensationalism is on order, but it's buttressed by fear, suffering, and desire – the schizo-blend that makes Arriaga's scripts so unique.
-
For a film that strives so hard to show the sheer messiness of real people's lives, Burning Plain does have an impossibly neat ending.
-
63Told chronologically, it might have accumulated considerable power. Told as a labyrinthine tangle of intercut timelines and locations, it is a frustrating exercise in self-indulgence by writer-director Guillermo Arriaga.
-
63The best performance here comes from a Mexican child actress, Tessa Ia, as half of one of the fraught mother-daughter relationships.
-
58Portland's dreary climate is used to good effect, but it's not enough to make up for the director's needlessly convoluted approach.
-
An ambitious, visually handsome production which fails to ignite.
-
The main drawbacks of The Burning Plain are its intentionally coy narrative and a zero-hour revelation that's ill-thought-out and generates some pretty chintzy psychobabble. It's the wobbliest element in an admirable, complex and frustrating movie.
-
50It's possible to admire the performances of stars Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger in The Burning Plain , even as you backpedal from the film, hoping the ponderous megasoap will just go away.
-
50Initially, the puzzle structure and a pair of Oscar-winning actresses distract us from the dark vacuum at the center of this enterprise, but when it implodes, it doesn't reverberate.
-
50Many of the weaknesses and few of the strengths of Guillermo Arriaga as a scripter are evident in his directing debut, The Burning Plain.
-
40All the actresses, especially Theron, are appropriately haunted, but let's hope Arriaga's love of echoes, fate and coincidence has run its mopey course.
-
38Here the characters aren't compelling enough to ask viewers to give their brains a workout to determine exactly what's going on.
-
33The scenery (prettily captured by There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit) is littered with heavy symbolism (fire! rain! dead birds!); the performances are merely heavy.
-
33The characters in The Burning Plain are so narrowly defined by tragedy that they reveal no other facets of humanity.
-
30Like his scripts for "21 Grams" and "Babel," this one makes heavy use of happenstance and temporal displacement, and like them, too, it depends on ideas about human behavior that can only be called preposterous.
-
This film's greatest accomplishment is that its theatrical gestures manage to feel preposterous, pretentious and routine at the same time.
-
The writer's most successful works--"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" and "Amores Perros"--were bolstered by directors who brought genuine emotion to the screen, but The Burning Plain marks Arriaga's behind-the-camera debut, and his obviousness is staggering.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 4 out of 4
-
Mixed: 0 out of 4
-
Negative: 0 out of 4
-
9
-
KateK9
-
DavidA9A good story, well told, beautifully filmed. The jumps in time are not confusing at all, there are so few main characters.