FRESH AIR
Spanish actor Javier Bardem burst into the American moviegoing consciousness in 2007, when he played a very bad man with a very bad haircut in the Coen brothers’ film No Country for Old Men. He won an Oscar for his trouble, then turned up again as a romantic Spanish artist in the Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Bardem recently received his third Academy Award nomination — his first was for the 2000 film Before Night Falls — for his performance in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s new film Biutiful. Bardem plays Uxbal, a small-time Barcelona criminal managing a crew of African immigrants selling knockoff goods on the street. (He also has connections to a sweatshop full of illegal Chinese immigrants who make the shoddy merchandise.) But he’s a loving and attentive father to his two children, and when he is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, he is forced to allow his ex-wife, a bipolar alcoholic played by Maricel Alvarez, to re-enter their children’s lives. MORE
[Illustration by BLAKE LOOSLI]