Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

Is success a burden? Can you be both professionally accomplished and personally fulfilled? To have such problems is, according to Bardo, an im...

How strange that a film as personal as Bardo should feel so borrowed. Indeed, the thing that most readily identifies Bardo as an Iñárritu movi...

Bardo plays like a greatest hits album, constantly dropping allusions, quotes and Easter egg-like references to its director’s previous work.

I suppose we do learn a great deal about where Iñárritu’s head has been these past few years, but the value of that insight is vastly dispropo...

The film signals that Alejandro G. Iñárritu, perhaps, is unable to push the limits of his own artistic expression.

The look-at-me tricks and recurring motifs can’t make up for a narrative that, once it comes into focus, is akin to listening to someone repea...

Alas the worthwhile aspects of the exercise mostly fall flat.

On and on the movie goes.

Therapy is not necessarily cinema. As the film floats on, drifting from one extravagantly engineered reverie to another, the filmmaker only occasio...

An overstated, overstuffed thing in which much of the intelligence, creative surprise and surpassing technical expertise has been drowned by a...

A deep dive into shallow existential waters.

Bardo is more mind-bending than heart-wrenching. It's psychologically interesting but not satisfyingly gripping.

How much sympathy can we muster for a wealthy, celebrated filmmaker on holiday? It’s hard not to roll your eyes when Silverio says things like...

The movie is full of good things, but it’s three hours long and mostly it’s full of itself.

It’s audacious, bold film-making, a highly personal work that is cluttered with symbolism and bloated with self-regard.

Named for a Buddhist concept referencing the transition between birth and death, Bardo may transport the viewer to a dream space but not...

There’s greatness packed in there, but the most lasting impression is how much time is spent trying to convince you of it.

It’s hard to shake off the cloying sense of self-indulgence and self-pity.

Bardo tries to do so much that in the end, it ends up saying nothing.

Often, it’s exhausting. Iñárritu has a lot of thoughts and feelings, and he apparently sought to stuff them all into one movie.

This is a tough sit, albeit one with a lot of beautiful imagery.

The inside of Iñárritu’s head isn’t an especially fascinating place to spend two-and-a-half hours. There may be a handful of truth...