While Iñárritu’s tactics can become tiresome over multiple views, he is perhaps one of the greatest, single-experience filmmakers working today.

| Aug 1, 2023

It is a heartfelt, beautifully constructed, heartbreaking and, at times, difficult to watch downer.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 3, 2020

Biutiful is a vision of a society that has broken down into layers of corruption, whose murk and misery can recall future-shock yarns like Blade Runner.

| Jan 21, 2020

Inarritu has captured more than just spirit with this film. Biutiful is beautiful inside and out.

| Nov 16, 2019

González Iñárritu has directed his gloomiest and least cohesive film to date.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 6, 2019

What kept me glued was the leading man whose increasingly ravaged eyes reflect a thousand tragedies with such ease: [Javier] Bardem is truly 'biutiful'.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 3, 2019

A cinematic, melancholic love song to Barcelona's unrepresented communities, with Uxbal as their totem.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 6, 2018

Inarritu and Bardem give just enough glimpses of hope, humanity, and yes, beauty, for the film to live up to its name.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 13, 2018

By focusing on Uxbal, Gonzlez Irritu slowly sinks through each layer of this single person...It is rare in film to be given the opportunity to know one character so intimately.

| May 16, 2018

Irritu pays very close attention to people and to background, creating an detailed portrait of the people who live in Barcelona's margins.

| Apr 30, 2018

The story can be distressing, hilarious, spiritual or simply biutiful, you are the one who decides. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2018

Irritu's trademark interwoven plots have one thread too many here, but this shattering experience-earthbound and fraught with the afterlife-is worth every undying minute.

| Feb 7, 2018

Do yourself a favor and treat yourself to Biutiful.

| Original Score: A+ | Sep 8, 2017

The Bataan Death March of art-directed miserablim. And to what end?

Full Review | May 3, 2015

The film is beautifully photographed and incredibly effective. Holding it all together is a brilliant central performance by Javier Bardem.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 24, 2013

This bloated drama is redeemed by its focus of a man caught between two distinctive and memorable worlds.

| Original Score: 3.0/5 | Jun 30, 2013

Bardem and Irritu draw you in to a story that says so much about not only its individual characters but also of life, exile, love, family and death.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2011

Unwatchable without Javier Bardem's affecting, devastatingly committed performance, Biutiful plunges the viewer into a shapeless, sprawling character study that functions as nothing less than a punishing reminder of how rotten the universe can be.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 21, 2011

Even though this movie piles it on, I can see its positive values and the potential it would have to reach the hearts of its audience.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 16, 2011

Bardem faultless, Inarritu not so much

| May 26, 2011