Critics reviews

If the film’s structural intricacies feel a bit rote, and its two-and-a-half-hour runtime somewhat oppressive, there’s a blunt, unrestrained poeticism to Iñárritu’s debut feature that leaves it, two decades later, still feeling very much alive.

Here it feels as if ordinary life itself has been infected, not by identifiable risks like robbers and bad drivers and jealous lovers, but by something more metaphysical: a general rise in the damage rate, like an epidemic, or a mysterious shift in the mortality statistics.

His triumph — helped by a cast of unknown actors who more than meet the standards of Hollywood venismo — is to give so lurid a sequence of events the force of reality; and make a story of relentless bleakness, oddly uplifting.

[T]here's a lot to recommend this. But ultimately, the structure lacks purpose, the film struggles to justify its two-and-a-half-hour running time and the faint-hearted might find it a little gory.

Iñárritu’s first feature, Amores Perros, has been understandably compared to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, but González Iñárritu seems to owe more to the kitchen-sink realism of Kiewslowski’s Decalogue.

González Iñárritu has modernized Mexican cinema by shooting and editing in a relentlessly urban, fast-paced and hip fashion, packed with sex and violence and raring to go. It's a breath of fresh air in an industry more accustomed to older narrative and pictorial styles.

This is hard core, and it ain't pretty. His movie doesn't have to be falsely gorgeous, though 2 1/2 hours after it begins, it finds the human beauty that spills out of the knife wounds.

"Amores Perros" at 154 minutes is heavy on story--too heavy, some will say--and rich with character and atmosphere. It is the work of a born filmmaker, and you can sense Gonzalez Inarritu's passion as he plunges into melodrama, coincidence, sensation and violence.

Like a couple of other powerful debuts from the last decade (I'm thinking of American Beauty and Reservoir Dogs), its dark, almost surrealist tone escalates it high above the usual gory gunfare and marks it as a film to be reckoned with.

Amores Perros goes right for the jugular. This sprawling pulp omnibus, an amazing first feature by the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, just keeps coming at you, switching characters, tones, and rhythms to keep you off-guard—never quite prepared for the inevitable worst.

If you haven’t fled the theater 20 minutes into the new Mexican film Amores Perros, you’ll be hooked until the end. It pulses with energy and wild style.

A feverish, breathtaking tour through Mexico City high and low, an explosive, mosaic-style portrait of our continent's largest city.