Can a movie be too well made for its own good? Stylish and painterly, with moments of great lyricism, it flies over the Spanish countryside to the sea...the film does everything in its power to escape the claustrophobia inherent in the story.

| Nov 1, 2007

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 1, 2006

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 7, 2005

Bardem is simply astounding as Sampedro.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Mar 4, 2005

If ever there was a film that deserved to get the proverbial bump from Oscar, this is it. Rarely has any film so focused on death felt so vibrantly alive.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 4, 2005

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2005

For whatever reason, it's an injustice that Bardem was not nominated for best actor.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 17, 2005

Bardem's Ramn is such a vital life force, it's all the more bittersweet to watch him fight to leave a world that would be much emptier and sadder without him in it.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Feb 17, 2005

Ultimately, this is one man's story, told with great empathy, and Amenbar deserves great credit for lifting the film above the soap-opera sentimentality into which it could have easily fallen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 4, 2005

In death is found a profound argument for life.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 4, 2005

A gorgeous film.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 3, 2005

This entire project easily could have turned into a weepy soap opera, but Bardem keeps it on point.

| Feb 3, 2005

It comes as no surprise to learn that Javier Bardem, the virile and charismatic Spanish actor, is capable of turning on the charisma even working only from the neck up. What is alarming is realizing that the rest of the movie he's in is paralyzed as well.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 21, 2005

Never once does this film sacrifice its moral ideas or complexity of character on the cheap altar of sentimentality.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 21, 2005

Soars to the fantastically romantic heights of love between a man and a woman.

| Jan 13, 2005

What could have been a preachy biopic becomes poetry in the hands of the gifted director and writer and editor and composer Alejandro Amenabar.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 6, 2005

Amenbar (the inventive Spaniard who made The Others) promotes dignity, love, and inspiration with such insistence that there's relatively little chance to feel Ramn Sampedro's unendurable pain.

| Original Score: B | Jan 5, 2005

Absorbing and almost unbearably poignant.

| Dec 29, 2004

Javier Bardem is the heart of this movie and he gives a great, screen-filling performance.

Full Review | Dec 20, 2004

There's a combination of fatalism and hard-edged humor at work in The Sea Inside that you can imagine Irish writers would feel right at home with.

| Dec 18, 2004