Screen Daily‘s Lee Marshall has strongly praised Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Burning Plain at the Venice Film Festival, and the Telegraph‘s David Gritten has written that “only three days into the festival, a front-runner for the Golden Lion best film award has emerged.”
Variety‘s Derek Elley, on other other hand, has given the “spaghetti-structured” drama the old back-hand, calling it “an elaborate writing exercise with few emotional hooks.” But I don’t trust Elley due to his belief that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Amores perros, 21 Grams and Babel — all based on Arriaga scripts — were “hit and miss.”
