Alejandro González Iñárritu's arty tearjerker is kind of like 127 Hours — you know how the film is going to end, and you wish it would just get it over with. He does have a knack for eye-catching openings; here the voices of a father and a daughter are heard over a serene, snowed-in wood. Things get pretty cluttered after that. Uxbal, played by Javier Bardem in a performance more tormented than the one in The Sea Inside, is a black-market operator in Barcelona. No wonder he's miserable: he has to deal with a promiscuous, bipolar ex-wife, two stressed-out kids, a police crackdown on his street vendors, and a basement full of illegal workers. To top it off, he's peeing blood. And you thought the guy in Russell Banks's Continental Drift had it tough. A turgid entry in a morbid trend that includes Hereafter and Enter the Void, Biutiful is a pretentious and maudlin indulgence in melodramatic overkill. In short, an Oscar nomination for Bardem.
