Alejandro González Iñárritu Archives

Digger review: There Will Be Floods

October 9, 2026October 9, 2026 Jeremy BeckReviews

The cat seems unwell. Fluffy white felines have long had a place in cinema—it’s been over six decades since Ernst Stavro Blofeld sinisterly stroked the coat of his pet kitty while threatening James Bond—but this little furball isn’t bright-eyed or cuddly. It’s a wheezing, whimpering creature, skin stretched over its bones, incapable of moving or eating on its own. Its strongest display of activity is the yowl it emits when a thermometer enters its anus, but otherwise it lacks the energy to even mewl. Weak and exhausted, it’s waiting for a benevolent executioner to put it out of its misery. The longer Digger goes on, the more likely you are to yearn for a similar act of mercy.

Or maybe not. Digger, the latest misbegotten epic from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, isn’t an especially appealing movie. It’s long, overdetermined, and—as with all of its maker’s films—self-indulgent. But it is also monumentally ambitious, and it unfolds with a level of stylistic bravado that tunes some of its more discordant notes back into harmony. (Speaking of music, the jittery, often insufferable score is by Cosmo Sheldrake.) If it’s a debacle, at least it’s one for the ages. Read More

The Revenant: In This Wilderness, It’s Men vs. Nature, and Man vs. Man

January 13, 2016June 28, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews

Leonardo DiCaprio braves the wilderness in Alejandro González Iñárritu's "The Revenant"

The Revenant defies categorization, not because it refuses to serve as a particular type of movie, but because it is so many movies at once. Both art film and action flick, both meditative drama and survivalist thriller, both historical fiction and contemporary allegory—the latest and craziest picture from provocateur Alejandro González Iñárritu wants it all. This level of naked ambition is rare in modern cinema, and it is tempting to praise The Revenant—a two-and-a-half hour adventure film with minimal dialogue and maximal craft—for simply existing. But look past its staggering audacity, and The Revenant reveals itself as a work of true duality, even beyond its mirrored ambitions. It is, in empirical terms, both a good movie and a bad one.

Let’s begin with the bad. Based on a novel by Michael Punke (Iñárritu wrote the screenplay along with Mark L. Smith), The Revenant‘s storyline is exceedingly slight. Set in the early nineteenth century, it follows a band of fur trappers in the American wilderness. Initially, there are roughly 30 of them, but after the native Arikara (dubbed “Ree”) spring an ambush—a characteristically bloody sequence filled with loud musket-fire and zooming arrows—their numbers are reduced to about 10, though only two are of any consequence. They are Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), an inveterate tracker with a half-Pawnee teenage son, and Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), a brusque trapper who is as unapologetically selfish as he is culturally insensitive. After Glass is severely wounded by a bear—more on that in a bit—he and Fitzgerald are separated from their unit; not one to loiter with an invalid, Fitzgerald murders Glass’s son and leaves the immobilized Glass for dead. The remainder of The Revenant focuses on Glass’sagonizing efforts to survive in the forbidding wild, driven by his need to enact revenge on his son’s killer. Read More