Also known as
Love's a Bitch
Lists
- ranked 86 in Edward Copeland's Satyajit Ray Memorial Anything-But-Definitive List of Non-English Language Films
- ranked 138 in The IMDb Top 250
- ranked 492 in Empire 500 Greatest Movies (2008)
- one of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
- one of Guardian 1,000 films to see before you die
- one of The New York Times Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made
Connect
Three stories about love (and dogs) from Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga, director and writer respectively of 21 Grams. Arriaga was also responsible for the script of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, one of the best movies I've seen this year.
Like 21 Grams, its characters -- vastly different people from vastly different walks of life -- are brought together by a car accident. In Amores Perros, though, they never even meet in conversation. Their connections are transitory, random things, and they never even realize the enormous, inadvertent effects that their actions have on these other lives.
It's a film about those human connections, be they the tenuous inter-story links or the more concrete relationships evident within each segment. What they have in common is that they're messy, unpredictable, and complicated; they're very real. Like life, the film is complicated, and very little in it offers perfect resolution.
The differences in the three segments -- and they are very, very different -- highlight the similarities. In their own way, each one explores the savage, beautiful experience of being human, and being human together.
Iñárritu's penchant for rapid cuts and violent camera movements is sometimes jarring, but perfectly sets the mood of violent, vibrant Mexican life. Performances are uniformly excellent, but animal lovers may object to the treatment of the dogs (special effects notwithstanding).
It's a brilliant film, well worth the time.