Alejandro G. Iñarritu, who we last checked in with way back at the start of 2016 with The Revenant, now joins Branagh, Gray, and Spielberg in releasing a film this year that comes with a heavy dose of autobiography. I can understand how wanky this can come across to some people, having a filmmaker devote so many hours to their own story (with varying degrees of varnish), but as an auteurist, there’s something I find quite fascinating about these kinds of productions. They take the idea of film as a personal form of art (ignoring how each and every film is the result of collaboration in one form or another) about as far as it can go while still being in the context of a work of fiction. And with this film, we find the director… well, in a pretty dark place.
