Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades

I went into this movie thinking it was going to be Alejandro Iñárritu’s version of the "director takes a nostalgic look back at his childhood celebrating the magic of the movies," like we've been inundated with over the past few years. Little did I know it would be Alejandro Iñárritu’s 8½—a far worse prospect. While I've enjoyed most of his previous films, I'd rather attend a week-long, 24/7 looping, Clockwork-Orange-style marathon of The Fabelmans, Armageddon Time, Empire of Light, Licorice Pizza, Belfast, and Roma than sit through Iñárritu's 8½-esque "director's block" movie. Not that there haven't been plenty of filmmakers who've used Federico Fellini’s acclaimed surrealist meditation on the loss of creative mojo as an excuse to make their own self-indulgent self-assessment. But François Truffaut, Woody Allen, and Bob Fosse all managed to create actual works of cinema while holding up a cinematic mirror to their own egos. Iñárritu, on the other hand, seems to lack the ability to create something enjoyable like Truffaut's Day for Night or insightful like Fosse's All The Jazz or hilarious like Allen's Stardust Memories. All of those are brilliantly directed films, not just films about "brilliant directors." And each of those self-styled auteurs understood full well what a potentially pretentious act of narcissism such an undertaking is. Not so Iñárritu.

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths possesses all the narrative depth and visual inventiveness of an ostentatious teenager whose parents have bought him a fancy camera, a wide-angle lens, and a selfy stick to take along on his first unsurprised vacation. Wretched.