Bad Education (La Mala educación) Reviews
Top CriticSimple melodrama, a not-that-puzzling puzzle of a film noir.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The performances are fine, and there are occasional flashes of the kind of inspired direction we have come to expect from Almodóvar, but, ultimately, Bad Education must be considered to be a minor effort from a major director.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Movie Boeuf
A rare disappointment from Almodóvar: perilously over the top gay chic coupled with an overly familiar condemnation of the Holy Catholic Church's blind eye towards pedophilia.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Visually, Bad Education's only impressive set piece is the dynamic, Saul Bass-esque opening credits.
Cinema Signals
A sexual culture dense with political strategies, power plays and self-promotional misbehaviors.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Charlotte Weekly
Paints vivid noir suspense with extremely broad brushstrokes, often pushing style to the forefront at the expense of story
| Original Score: C-
Film Threat
Truly awful. Feels like a third-rate parody of Almodovar's work, rather than the genuine article.
Full Review
| Original Score: 0.5/5
Coast (Halifax, Nova Scotia)
It's really a greatest hits compilation of Almodovar's own work - all the standout tracks are here, but with none of the context and soul afforded by those connective numbers.
Capital Times (Madison, WI)
Too delighted with its own cleverness.
Full Review | Original Score: 2/4
Internet Reviews
Almodóvar gave me no education whatsoever, good or bad. His film just took up some of my time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
JoBlo's Movie Emporium
Nothing particularly memorable or spectacular...
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
culturevulture.net
An hour in, everything in the movie is upended in a way that is not so much difficult to swallow as simply out of left field.
I found the film devious and confused in its Pirandellian contrivances and shifts of identity.
If only Bad Education engaged the heart as much as the head, Almodovar's fractured tale might have risen above its alienating noir conventions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Common Sense Media
Tragic story of church's betrayal; adults only.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Entertainment Insiders
Where Talk To Her moved me in serious ways, Education just sat there flat in all its twisted coolness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
FilmStew.com
Twenty years after Brazilian filmmaker Hector Babenco's Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Almodovar uncorks his own more quixotic movie-movie treatment of male love.
Zertinet Movies
It's an irresistible enigma of a film
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
