21 Grams Reviews
Top Critic
Challenges and provokes in unexpected ways.
| Original Score: 4/4
[An]uncommonly ambitious, superbly acted, frustratingly flawed drama.
Establishes [Inarritu] as a major cinematic force.
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| Original Score: A+
You won't soon forget the world that Gonzalez Inarritu creates.
| Original Score: B+
Fascinating because of the way the story is told -- and because of the existential issues that it forces you to consider.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The performances, the way Inarritu deconstructs and reconstructs the narrative, the grainy, gritty feel and look, all lead to the rare sort of experience that only a truly great film can offer.
| Original Score: A+
This is a mesmerizing film that is the work of genius.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Every year needs a challenging masterwork, a movie that defies filmmaking convention and leaves an indelible mark on the collective psyche.
| Original Score: 5/5
One of the most riveting and moving experiences of the year, a movie of aching soulfulness and transforming power.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Is the strategy to make you work so hard to determine where you are in the timeline that you overlook what a dreary and conventional little soap opera this is?
This is cinematic storytelling of a very high order, and the clear work of a moviemaker who has almost instantly established himself as a force to be reckoned with.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Though not depressing, because nothing this good is, the film is haunting -- a walk on the razor's edge between life and death.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
If not for its show-offy back-and- forthing of time, the movie would be a banal, pointlessly depressing exercise.
Tough, smart, relentless, provocative and, above all, serious.
Watching it is a wrenching experience; the usual layers of distance between actors and audience are stripped away, and we not only watch their anguish, but become part of it.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Inarritu and Arriaga's first English-language film doesn't approach the brilliance of Amores Perros, but it succeeds on a more modest scale.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A capital-M movie, and the most flagrant kind: Heavy emotion, heavy style, and lite philosophy converge and choke us with meaning.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This may be the most brilliantly made movie of the year. But you don't enjoy 21 Grams, you recover from it.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Boasts so many moments of sublime acting that it's hard to know where to start.
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| Original Score: A-
Confounded my high expectations by being much too depressing for my taste.
Blessed with one of the strongest casts of any American movie this year, this bravura film, with its radical structure, is full of risk and reward.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Watching Penn and Del Toro (and, to a lesser extent, the actually young and actually beautiful Watts) navigate the recesses of these damaged, ambivalent characters ... is pretty much worth the price of admission.
A good movie which just misses being great.
Using the structure of Amores Perros, Inarritu takes his complex tale of hope and redemption and breaks it into a mosaic of emotional tiles that add up to more than the whole.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The title refers to the weight -- perhaps the soul -- the body is said to lose at the precise moment of death. But 21 Grams has no shortage of soul, wit or intelligence.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Unstintingly explores and exposes excruciating pain, raw grief, ruinous vengeance and life-affirming resilience, creating human portraits that are uncommonly exhilarating in their honesty.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Watts, Penn and Del Toro have all been brilliant before, and if we're lucky, they will all be brilliant again. But to watch these three -- working alone and in tandem -- is to experience the strange, at times frightening alchemy of screen acting.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
You won't see more explosive acting this year.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The three leads are superb, as are Melissa Leo and Charlotte Gainsbourg in supporting roles.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Watts, who has the most difficult scenes, is splendidly mercurial; what's surprising is that those professional storm clouds Penn and Del Toro are here as powerfully restrained as she is electrifying.
It's one of those motion pictures that haunts your thoughts and won't let go.
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| Original Score: 4/4
This film has great performances all around, especially from Naomi Watts in maybe her best role yet.
It's a startlingly crafted movie, with several extraordinary performances.
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| Original Score: B+
You won't come out unaffected, because the depths of intimacy that the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu plumbs here are so rarely touched by filmmakers that 21 Grams is tantamount to the discovery of a new country.
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| Original Score: 5/5
A sad movie about the irony of inescapable destiny, it left me captivated and trembling.
This movie knocks you out with an astonishing blend of hyper-realism, visual complexity and powerful themes.
