20. Amores perros (Best of the Decade)

Amores perros (2000)

Amores perros is a tour de force of love, loss, and redemption. The film contains three stories, each connected to a single car cash, and each including dogs as a central symbol of brutality and innocence, stability and fragility. The title is loosely translated as “Love’s a Bitch,” but I suspect it was unchanged for American release because that doesn’t sum it up as nicely as “amores perros,” which translates poorly and sounds mysterious to us English-speaking folk. The film is the directorial debut of Alejandro González Iñárritu, who completed his “trilogy” of films with 21 Grams and Babel. Iñárritu and his fellow countrymen Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro have secured modern Mexican film a place in the global film industry with regard to both artistic achievement and critical acclaim. Cuarón’s Y tu mama también and Children of Men and del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth are all contenders for many critics’ best of the decade list. However, I consider Amores perros the best of the bunch, and it is (regrettably) the only foreign-language film on my list.