Amores Perros

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Film Description

Voted best film by the critics at Cannes 2000. Amores Perros explodes onto the screen with a bone-crunching car crash. The lives of its three victims are then imaginatively interwoven in this visceral eulogy to life and loss on Mexico's mean streets.

Film Information

DVD Extras

Includes a commentary by writer & director, behind the scenes feature, 3 music videos, trailer.

Technical Details

Reviews & Articles

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Review by Mike McCahill on 1st March 2002

When Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction beat out Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours Red to win the Cannes Palme D'Or in 1994, the prophets of cinema, sensing a moment of significance, decried that all was lost, that the Cannes jury had given carte blanche to the post-modern inmates starting to deconstruct the asylum. Seven years later, this new Mexican feature may be the first film to confound the critics by being influenced by both those films and yet retain its own distinct textures. Its three tales of love, loss and dogs in Mexico City have enough sex and violence and people doing fantastic and terrible things to one another's bodies to remind one of the American cinema, but - as with the Three Colours movies - keep coming back to the small group of people whose lives we have become involved with.

The three tales are chosen to illustrate different kinds of love: neither the second, nor the third story comes close to matching the high-octane blood-sweat-and-tears of the first - in which dog-fighters tangle in a domestic tug-of-love - but then repetition doesn't seem to be high on Inarritu's agenda, and one of the reasons Amores Perros works as an impressive calling-card is that each of the pieces is very different in look and tone, allowing the debut director to prove himself as capable of handling a hip Tarantinoid crime segment as he is a melancholic Kieslowski-esque chamber piece. The second story, which starts with a decoy romance between a Cindy Crawford lookalike model and a Richard Gere-like matinee idol, is mostly confined to the model's dream apartment (which gets more and more beaten up as the film goes on) and has the ring of a Raymond Carver short story on love; the third story follows a tramp hitman known as "The Goat" but so removed from the world he's more of a ghost, with a wrinkle for every job and dirt so far under his fingernails that it's never coming out, as he goes about the city's scrapyards and rubbish dumps and tries to make up with his daughter.

The mood throughout is equal parts hopeful and pessimistic. If this is what we're prepared to do to man's best friend, Inarritu posits, what, then, are we liable to do to loved ones and strangers? Man himself gets down on all fours, is chained to a post, sits in front of the TV with his tongue hanging out, and goes for the throat of his fellow man in dark alleyways. The hitman is not the only character to care for his dog, but the only one who learns anything from animal behaviour: everyone in the end gets more or less what they deserve, though it's a sign of how much the writer and director have brought you into their world that you might ponder, long after the end credits, the fate of the unborn baby in the film's first part.

After last year's outstanding Magnolia, this is another ensemble piece perfectly realised, swapping frogs for dogs, but sharing Paul Thomas Anderson's fondness for telling little details tacked into the corner of the big cinema frame (it would seem one of the brothers in the final story is dating the woman who features on a poster in the bedroom of one of the brothers in the first episode) and it's here - in watching someone cutting their toenails (a quotidian act, but so rarely filmed) - you sense Inarritu's eye for detail. He also knows how to punctuate a movie for maximum effect: unlike Tarantino's breathless stream of words and deeds, each story here has at least one pause (paws?) for thought before the lights come back on, a crucial time and space for reflection. The final image, too, is of one man and his dog, walking through the darkness to find light at the end of the world: there is no full stop, no bullet point here - the film may end, but the quest for the meaningful companionship of any species goes on.

Review by Thanda Makhathini on 13th April 2005

This is an Unforgettable Cinematic Experience. The movie starts with a slam bang of an accident and from then on you are drawn in the goggle box and can't take your eyes away. This movie ranks amongst the best world movies. I have never been moved by such an unpredictable plot. There are three stories in one movie and when the movie starts to unfold and bring the three lives together as a viewer you can't help but applaud the plot which is totally unpredictable, witty and mesmerising. The performance by actors is excellent. I'm surely going to purchase a few from this Mexican director. The DVD also has a lot of extras. A definite MUST HAVE movie.

View more reviews by Thanda Makhathini

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Article - "21 Grams" by Peter Wild
Thursday 5th August 2004

Unlike Quentin Tarantino – who chose to follow the daring non-linearity of Pulp Fiction with the altogether more sedate Jackie Brown – Gonzalez Inarritu upped the ante on himself for his second feature, taking everything that was so exhilarating about his debut Amore...  View article in full

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Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Best Portmanteau Films

Including: 11/09/01 - September 11, 21 Grams, Amores Perros, Coffee And Cigarettes, Crash (2004), Dekalog (Parts 1-5), Dekalog (Parts 6-10), Four Rooms, Immoral Tales, Kwaidan (Masters of Cinema).

Promising Directorial Debuts

Including: Alien 3, Amores Perros, Angel (1982), Badlands, Being John Malkovich, Bleak Moments, Blood Simple, Bottle Rocket, Breathless (Godard, 1959), Citizen Kane.

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