Some friends and I were recently listing the saddest movies we’d ever seen, and I didn’t really have one. My disposition falls on the happy-go-lucky side, and I tend to avoid anything that will send me into spirals of depression. I say that having just watched Biutiful, a Spanish-language import from director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams), in which Javier Bardem plays a devoted father of two who is diagnosed with terminal cancer and spends his last months on earth squirreling away ill-gotten cash so his kids won’t starve when he’s gone. Wait, it gets worse.
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 2, 2011.