"Look in my eyes. Look at my face. Remember me, please. Don't forget me, Ana. Don't forget me, my love, please."

I don't get how everyone says this and "Babel" is Iñárritu worst movie. I don't get it. This movie was so beautiful in every sense of the word. Sad, but real.

Can I just say how brilliant of an actor Javier Bardem is? It's nothing new, but it begs to repeat, and here it does. Without spoiling anything, but the scene between him and his daughter was one of the most moving and human things I've ever seen. It was hard to watch for the right reasons. Facial expressions alone with barely any dialogue spoken, you as an audience…

I tried to pray, but I don’t know who to pray to.

Biutiful is a movie where every breath feels heavy and every moment is laced with quiet despair. Alejandro González Iñárritu delivered one of his finest, yet severely underrated, masterpieces. Many would say Birdman, The Revenant, and Amores Perros to be his finest works, but Biutiful should be considered among those movies as well. He manages to craft a portrait of life so unrelentingly bleak it feels like a slow suffocation. 

Javier Bardem delivered a career-defining performance in No Country for Old Men. However, in my honest opinion, his performance in Biutiful surpasses that. What’s so brilliant about his performance is that he doesn’t display any melodrama nor anguish.…

Talk about a double downer, I watched Lars Von Trier's “Dogville” and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Biutiful” back to back. Despite the overload of misanthropic nihilism, it made for an interesting comparison between the two filmmakers. “Biutiful” is the kind of film Von Trier can only dream of making. Inarritu is everything Von Trier isn’t; he has his finger on the pulse of the human condition. Rather than telling gimmicky stories, he tells stories about deeply flawed people in a way that showcases some of the worst aspects of humanity, whilst always allowing them a small thread of hope and optimism that they can piece their lives back together, even though they seldom do, or if they do, it’s not for…

From the director of Amores Perros, 21 Grams & Babel comes another poignant drama that's intimately crafted & strongly acted but the film as a whole remains a largely underwhelming affair that's stuck on one level from start to finish and if it wasn't for Javier Bardem's heartbreaking input, it would be a forgettable fare.

Set in the underbelly of Barcelona, Biutiful tells the story of a deeply conflicted man who's struggling in every facet of life. Barely making enough money to take care of his two children and separated from his wife who suffers from bipolar disorder, his life falls apart when he learns that he is diagnosed with terminal cancer which sets him on a path to get his affairs…

At the centre of Biutiful Javier Bardem gives an extraordinary and subtle performance. The film is also beautifully shot, with shining colours that make the whole world vibrant. However, aside from those things, Biutiful is an underwhelming effort. It is set in society's dark underbelly, but doesn't really have a point of view about anything. Despite a story set amongst the economic struggles of migrants, Biutiful has no social commentary nor does it give those characters much depth. Instead the setting is just used to pile misery on top of misery. This mostly feels like vapid, meaningless cinema, with arthouse aesthetics randomly paired with basic ideas about the human condition. There seems to be no purpose to Biutiful, so nothing…