Biutiful

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful opened at Cannes 2010, where Javier Bardem won the Best Actor prize; Bardem was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, and the film was Mexico's official Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film. It was the first screenplay credited to Iñárritu alone, after his collaborations with Guillermo Arriaga 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 working the city's grey-market economy: he places illegal Senegalese street vendors, takes cuts from Chinese sweatshop bosses and mediates between hostile sub-economies. He is a single father of two young children, supporting his bipolar ex-wife (Maricel Álvarez) emotionally and financially, and he has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The film follows his attempt to arrange care for his children before he dies, while crisis after crisis hits the underground economies he depends on. The break from Arriaga shows everywhere: in place of the multi-strand mosaic of Babel and 21 Grams, the film holds to one protagonist's continuous timeline.

Rodrigo Prieto photographs working-class Barcelona (Sant Adrià de Besòs, the back streets behind the Sagrada Família) with a look unlike anything else in Iñárritu's career. Of all his films it is the most narrowly focused on a single life, and Bardem's performance, as physical as it is emotional, is among the most committed he has given.