mark_leeforshaw

Almodovar's finest film takes the raw material of melodrama and fashions it into something so fresh and free of contrived histrionics that the end experience feels like a revelation: a window into a rarely glimpsed world of truly adult film-making that is anything but boring or well meaning. This film celebrates various incarnations of womanhood without the slightest patina of political correctness or falsely ingratiating gestures. It is warm, sad, funny and human - expressing true tenderness for it subjects. Yet it is also an intellectual film: a knowing (though never merely clever) homage to some of the great women and feminine rolls of film history - such as those played by Bette Davies (the title recalls that of "All About Eve") and Gena Rowlands. The performances are beautiful and subtle and in the end "Todo sobre mi madre" satisfies in a way that even few great films can.

"Amores Perros" is a raw and visceral experience. Real passion, intelligence and craft has gone into making this wonderful film. By contrast most other films of the last few years seem bland and antiseptic. The film places the viewer right in the heart of urban Mexico, and amidst this teeming environment the characters' lives play out - full of immanent (and often eruptive) violence and feeling. The film has one of those episodic structures familiar from "Traffic", "Short Cuts" and "Magnolia". Yet it is a superior work to all of these films, not only because it feels less contrived, but also because it is blessedly free of the kind of characters who spend far too long hand-wringing and feeling sorry for themselves. Refreshingly, "Amores Perros" is not concerned to dissect "dysfunctional" people or "dysfunctional" social systems. It pulls off that rare trick of seeming to issue from right inside the worlds it portrays, rather than standing apart from them. This may well be an illusion, but that of course is what makes the achievement of "Amores Perros" all the more impressive. (It is also one of the only films I have ever seen that uses animals to signify in a way that is neither sentimental nor monstrous.) 10/10

Rarely have I witnessed such a gratuitous waste of talent. There is almost nothing constructive to be said about this hopeless swamp of a film. What few interesting strands the film seems to promise initially turn out to be little more than red herrings. Actors of stature - Robert Duvall, Robert Downey, Jr. - are deployed in roles which go nowhere; a director of occasional genius produces a film which looks like it is filmed through a coffee-stained camera lens; a writer (John Grisham) who has never produced anything of merit, discovers new depths of under-motivated incoherence. The film has a cheap, lecherous feel about it - but barely at the level of commentary - its really part of the aesthetic. Normally, I come on to the IMDb to write balanced, generally appreciative comments. This egregious disaster of a film just makes me want to produce an endless, bilious rant. I won't, but only because I no longer want to occupy my "mind" with this trash.