7 Best Movies Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Winner of four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Michael Keaton shines as a washed-up superhero actor desperately seeking artistic validation through an ambitious Broadway play. The film is astonishingly edited to look like one seamless, unbroken take through the theater's hallways and dressing rooms, driven by Antonio Sánchez's jazzy drum score.

Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his long-awaited Oscar for his physically punishing role as fur trapper Hugh Glass, left for dead by his companion (Tom Hardy) after a brutal bear attack. Shot exclusively in natural light in freezing wilderness by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, this is a monumental odyssey of revenge and primal instinct.

Iñárritu's sensational feature debut sent shockwaves through Latin American cinema. A fatal car crash in chaotic Mexico City links three raw stories about illegal dog fighting, a disfigured fashion model, and a homeless hitman. Gael García Bernal broke through internationally in this explosive gut-punch of a film.

The second film in Iñárritu's 'Trilogy of Death.' With an ingenious, non-linear structure, the film tells of the intertwined fates of three tormented souls (Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio del Toro) after a tragic car accident. Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro both earned Oscar nominations for their devastating performances.

The monumental closing chapter of his thematic trilogy. Two stray bullets fired by Moroccan shepherd boys trigger a chain reaction that links lives in Morocco, the United States, Mexico, and Tokyo. With Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and Rinko Kikuchi, Iñárritu explores humanity's universal inability to understand one another across cultural and physical borders.

Javier Bardem delivers one of the most impressive performances of his career as Uxbal, a man who helps illegal immigrants find work in Barcelona's underbelly and discovers he has only months left to live. A spiritual, melancholic, and deeply moving meditation on fatherhood, guilt, and making peace with death.

Iñárritu's most surreal and dreamlike film, inspired by Federico Fellini's 8½. A celebrated Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker returns from Los Angeles to his homeland and finds himself in an existential tightrope walk between memory, guilt over emigration, and Mexico's violent history.