Biutiful Reviews
Akron Beacon Journal
Excellent performance by Javier Bardem lifts a movie that often drags.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Flicks.co.nz
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Ebert Presents At The Movies
Biutiful is mushy and self-important and the subplots Inarritu adds to it only dilute the film further, while also pushing it's running time to a watery two and a half hours.
DCist
All that useless beauty and depth of emotion floats aimlessly in Iñárritu's needlessly over-complicated, self-consciously tricky narrative.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.1/10
Las Vegas Weekly
Gonzalez Inarritu spends two and a half hours torturing his protagonist, but by the end it's the audience that feels defeated.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
Top CriticAm I the only one who sensed trouble when the painfully methodical spacing and timing of the opening titles suggested the heaviest, most medicinal tragedy of this or any other year?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Orlando Weekly
Iñárritu's fourth film is only kept from the verge of self-parody by Bardem's soulful, understated performance.
East Bay Express
We need a break from Iñárritu's needlessly fractured, misery-and-mishap-laden parables of hectic modern life in a shrinking world full of desperate people.
Times-Picayune
On its way to profundity, Inarritu's film ends up getting tangled in its own histrionics.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Slant Magazine
Bardem is superb, but this is a slog, lurching despite high-pressure editing and utterly oblivious to how the harsh-poetic compassion from Amores Perros has hardened into a rather gloating hunger for suffering.
St. Paul Pioneer Press
All in all, it feels like director/co-screenwriter Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is daring us to say, "Uncle," and I was there within about 10 minutes.
Film4
Inarritu, not content to just lay it on thick, smothers his canvas with self-important gloom.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Christianity Today
The film is almost too broken and painful for most audiences to be able to experience Uxbal's pain. It's all here, and laid on a bit too thick.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Lessons of Darkness
A punishingly contrived and deterministic saga.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Urban Cinefile
The film seems ponderous, weighed down and elongated by an overactive poetic sensibility
At the Movies (Australia)
The film, whatever its intentions, winds up just being deeply depressing and, at nearly 2 1/2 hours, it's a very long slog indeed to the finish.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Paste Magazine
The film just doesn't come together, and all the well-meaning social criticism and award-winning emoting from Bardem can't change that fact.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.3/10
The Age (Australia)
Javier Bardem was Oscar-nominated for his performance and the film got a nod for best foreign-language film, but don't let that fool you; it's a stodgy, self-important slog.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
BrianOrndorf.com
Picture spins about, hitting a few sublimely quivering beats of frustration and confession before it loses itself to pretension and trivial displays of surrealism. There's a remarkable film in here somewhere.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Antagony & Ecstasy
Piling one garish note on top of the next... Biutiful might have been tolerable if it had been played for black comedy, or at least soap operatic excess.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/10
