Alejandro G. Iñárritu makes distress feel immediate, through tangled stories and restless camerawork. We value his force and ambition, most of all in Amores Perros, while sometimes wishing he would ask less of our patience.
Fi1m perspective
In Amores Perros (2000), a car crash connects three stories in Mexico City, carrying us across a sharp divide in wealth. Iñárritu makes each story urgent enough that waiting for the connections becomes a secondary pleasure. The collision lets him move between lives that money usually keeps apart. His feature debut remains our clearest reason to recommend him: gripping, often upsetting, and full of people worth following even when the plotting strains belief.
Guillermo Arriaga’s screenplay gives love, violence and bad decisions equal room, and the performances make its contrivances worth accepting. Luis Carballar, Iñárritu and Fernando Pérez Unda edit with a firm sense of when to switch stories and when to stay put. The complicated construction is easy to follow without feeling mechanical, and across 154 minutes we rarely want it to hurry up. We were upset by the graphic cruelty to dogs in Amores Perros.
21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006) extended that early interest in fractured, interconnected stories, with Babel taking it across cultures and languages. After the collaboration with Arriaga ended, Biutiful (2010) began another phase. By Birdman (2014), the long-take style put sustained camera movement at the centre of the experience. The Revenant (2015) combined survival drama with demanding location shooting. The methods change, but he keeps asking us to spend a long time under pressure.
Our reservation is how insistently he asks: suffering can become repetitive, and conspicuous technique can make us notice the director when we should be attending to the character. Bardo (2022), his semi-autobiographical exploration of identity and memory, tests patience in a way the busy storytelling of Amores Perros rarely does. That earlier film has flaws we can name and performances that persuade us to accept them. Start there, provided the warning about cruelty to dogs is one you can live with.
Biography
Alejandro González Iñárritu is a Mexican film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. He was born on 15 August 1963 in Mexico City. His feature directorial debut was Amores Perros (2000), on which he also served as producer and co-editor.
Iñárritu is known for films including 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Biutiful (2010), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) and The Revenant (2015). For Birdman he won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay; he won a further Oscar for directing The Revenant. He is the third director to win consecutive Best Director Oscars.
