Every Alejandro González Iñárritu Movie, Ranked

In this satirical black comedy, Tom Cruise (under heavy prosthetic makeup) stars as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon and the world's richest man, who is rushing to save the world from an impending extinction-level calamity … that he is responsible for. It co-stars Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, and John Goodman as the President of the United States. 

The film provoked visceral responses from critics. Everyone appreciated Cruise taking a risky role for the first time in over a decade, but many were exasperated by what they took to be limp satire and directorial excess. It's one of those movies that critics respect for its ambition and audacity, but whose execution they don't actually like. 

"For all the film's crazy performances, its directorial grandstanding, its wildly miscalculated rug pulling, a genuine current of civilizational despair runs through Digger. That sadness, that horror, serves as Iñárritu's ultimate justification, and this time, it's a compelling one. Somewhere behind that camera, he acknowledges he is just as lost as the rest of us." —Bilge Ebiri, Vulture

Iñárritu's first film fully produced in his native Mexico since his debut, Amores perros, Bardo is a personal and idiosyncratic film following a documentary filmmaker, Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), as he grapples with the choices he's made in his life. Silverio has strained relationships with his family and his country, which he left to pursue his career in America, but still feels the pressure to represent, and his internal conflicts are presented in surreal fashion. 

Critics had a hard time with the film. While reviewers praised the performances, the imagery, and the cinematography from Darius Khondji, who was nominated for an Academy Award, they criticized the three-hour length (the cut many of them watched at Venice was even longer) and scattered themes as self-indulgent. 

"The picture still meanders and drags, and sometimes Iñárritu's lofty ideas come off like a hot-air balloon that deflates and gets stuck in the trees. You wish he could just move on with things already. And yet there are some magnificent visions in Bardo." —Stephanie Zacharek, Time

Javier Bardem stars in this drama as Uxbal, a member of Barcelona's underclass, who gets diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. The story follows him as he tries to find someone to take care of his children after he dies.

The film received mixed reviews, with some critics admiring its poetic tone and Bardem's performance (he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, and the Spanish-Mexican film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film). Many others, however, were turned off by Biutiful's bottomless well of misery—at nearly two and a half hours long, it's a very tough hang. 

"It's a one-note character that Bardem builds into a complex emotional chord, lessening the urge to dismiss Biutiful solely as an endurance test for viewers." —Steve Persall, Tampa Bay Times

Babel is the final entry in Iñárritu's "Death Trilogy" of films written by Guillermo Arriaga with ensemble casts and interweaving stories. Here, those stories are set all over the globe—in Mexico, Morocco, the United States, and Japan—with characters that link together in unexpected ways, played by Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Rinko Kikuchi, among many others. 

Critics found it to be the most ambitious iteration of the interweaving style Iñárritu previously used in 21 Grams and Amores perros (see below), praising its complex but digestible structure, use of tension, and cinematography. However, detractors found it to be a bleak film spread too thinly across too many storylines. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, and won one, for Best Original Score.

"All told, the movie also is a tremendous downer. The script goes for a vaguely upbeat conclusion, but it has no spiritual dimension that the viewer feels with any emotion, and it conveys a hopeless, pessimistic future for the interconnected world that it portrays." —William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The second film of the "Death Trilogy" is a nonlinear narrative about the lives of people affected by a tragic hit-and-run accident. Benicio del Toro is the driver, Naomi Watts is the woman whose family he killed, and Sean Penn is the man who received her late husband's heart. Their grief brings them together in ways that lead to more grief and, eventually, healing, at least for some of them.

Many critics were blown away by the film's emotional potency and superb craftsmanship, praising the performances of the three main actors (del Toro and Watts were nominated for Academy Awards), while others found the nonlinear structure unnecessary. 

"While a splendidly acted and worthily grown-up movie, too often has the feel of a potboiling soap opera, with twists and turns that range from the grimly ironic to the absurdly sensational." —Shawn Levy, The Oregonian

Leonardo DiCaprio stars in this harrowing tale of survival and revenge. He plays Hugh Glass, a fur trapper on the American frontier in 1823, who's left for dead by his companions after he's mauled by a grizzly bear. Glass does whatever it takes to survive as he tries to get back to civilization and punish Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who wronged him the worst.

Reviewers were enamored with DiCaprio's ferociously locked-in performance that won him the Academy Award for Best Actor; the film's natural light cinematography that earned Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki his second consecutive win for Best Cinematography; and Best Director winner Iñárritu's commitment to creating a transcendantly brutal atmosphere. 

"The most punishing movie of 2015, The Revenant, is almost as brutal an experience for the viewer to watch as it is for its title character Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) to undergo. That's not meant as a knock, but rather as a warning that the film may leave you as near-speechless and mono-minded as its battered returnee from the dead." —Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle

Iñárritu's debut follows interlocking stories in Mexico City that come together at the scene of a car crash, and all involve dogs in some way. Gael Garcia Bernal plays a young man who starts participating in dogfighting in order to make enough money to save his sister-in-law from his abusive brother-in-law; Goya Toledo plays a supermodel who loses her leg in the accident; and Emilio Echevarría plays a homeless man who's actually a hitman. 

The film announced Iñárritu as a major talent who deals in structural experimentation and heavy themes. Critics loved it for its unpredictability, relentless energy, and savage humor. 

"A feverish, breathtaking tour through Mexico City high and low, an explosive, mosaic-style portrait of our continent's largest city." —Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

In this ambitious showbiz dramedy, Michael Keaton plays a Michael Keaton-esque actor named Riggan, who is haunted—quite literally—by Birdman, a superhero that was his career-defining role a long time ago. While Riggan rehearses a Broadway play, he tries to reconnect with his daughter (Emma Stone), fights with his arrogant co-star Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), and grapples with his own feelings of self-doubt.

Reviews of Birdman praised it for its technical mastery—the film is presented as one continuous take, though it was actually filmed as a series of long takes. It required an extremely high level of craft and skill to make, and for their efforts Iñárritu won Best Director, Lubezki won Best Cinematography, and the film won Best Picture. 

"Shot in 30 days after a long rehearsal period, with the actors' and the camera's movements calibrated to the inch and the millisecond so the action flows smoothly, the picture has the jagged energy of a long guerrilla raid choreographed by Bob Fosse." —Richard Corliss, Time