For a film that strives so hard to show the sheer messiness of real people's lives, Burning Plain does have an impossibly neat ending.Read Full Review »
63
Boston Globe: Mark Feeney
The best performance here comes from a Mexican child actress, Tessa Ia, as half of one of the fraught mother-daughter relationships.Read Full Review »
63
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES: Roger Ebert
Told chronologically, it might have accumulated considerable power. Told as a labyrinthine tangle of intercut timelines and locations, it is a frustrating exercise in self-indulgence by writer-director Guillermo Arriaga.Read Full Review »
33
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Lisa Schwarzbaum
The scenery (prettily captured by There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit) is littered with heavy symbolism (fire! rain! dead birds!); the performances are merely heavy.Read Full Review »
30
The New York Times: A.O. Scott
Like his scripts for “21 Grams” and “Babel,” this one makes heavy use of happenstance and temporal displacement, and like them, too, it depends on ideas about human behavior that can only be called preposterous.Read Full Review »
20
Village Voice: Aaron Hillis
The writer's most successful works--"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" and "Amores Perros"--were bolstered by directors who brought genuine emotion to the screen, but The Burning Plain marks Arriaga's behind-the-camera debut, and his obviousness is staggering.Read Full Review »
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