When so much current movie-making is risk-averse, sanitised, cinema by consensus, you have to admire a film that takes such an ambitious and unfettered approach to storytelling. You don’t, however, have to like it. I’ve watched Alejandro Iñárritu’s latest – the wildly uneven, Fellini-esque Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths – twice. That’s a little shy of six hours of my life (Iñárritu cut about 20 minutes from the film after its premiere). It’s audacious, bold film-making, a highly personal work that is cluttered with symbolism and bloated with self-regard. It is, very occasionally, brilliant: a deft reveal in the final 20 minutes ties together the disparate, seemingly unrelated scenes that came before. But with its overuse of fish-eye lenses and the quacking, whimsical brass-heavy score, it’s extremely hard work.
In cinemas now and on Netflix from 16 December
