Biutiful

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful opened at Cannes 2010 and won Javier Bardem the Best Actor prize, alongside an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and Mexico's official Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film. The film was Iñárritu's first solo-credited screenplay (after his Guillermo Arriaga collaborations on Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel) and his first feature shot in Spanish since Amores Perros a decade earlier.

Uxbal (Bardem) is a Barcelona fixer operating in the city's grey-market economy: placing illegal Senegalese street vendors, taking cuts from Chinese sweatshop bosses, mediating between hostile sub-economies. He is a single father of two young children, supporting his bipolar ex-wife (Maricel Álvarez) emotionally and financially, and recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. The film follows his attempt to organise care for his children before he dies, against a backdrop of cascading crises in the underground economies he depends on. Iñárritu's transition out of his celebrated collaboration with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga is everywhere visible: stripped of the multi-strand mosaic structure of Babel and 21 Grams, the film holds to a single protagonist's continuous timeline.

Rodrigo Prieto's photography of working-class Barcelona — Sant Adrià de Besòs, the back-streets behind the Sagrada Família — produced one of the most distinctive visual registers of Iñárritu's career. The film is unusual among his works for restricting itself to a single protagonist's continuous timeline; Bardem's performance, simultaneously physical and emotional, is widely cited as one of his most committed.