"Batalla en el cielo" is one of those inert, enervating art movies that comes along from time to time and has highbrow critics reaching for the superlatives. By using amateur actors it masquerades as naturalistic, but it is in fact as artificial as a piece of modern conceptual art.<br /><br />**Major spoilers ahead** <br /><br />Set in present day Mexico City, what little story there is revolves around a chubby middle-aged chauffeur named Marcos (Marcos Hernandez), who together with his even chubbier wife, seems to have kidnapped a baby who has subsequently died. All this drama happens off camera, as does just about everything else that might be of interest, except for the sex. Indeed, Marcos has quite a lot of sex, both with his wife and (separately) with a much younger woman named Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), the daughter of his rich employer. Marcos, who may or may not be guilt-ridden about the infant's death (it's anybody's guess, since all the actors have clearly been directed to refrain from anything resembling emotional expression), tells Ana about the kidnapping and she encourages him to turn himself in to the police. Later on he stabs Ana to death and then joins a religious pilgrimage, dying on his knees in church. As has been well documented, the sex in "Batalla en el cielo" is very explicit indeed. Director Carlos Reygadas seems to be garnering praise for the mere fact that he has filmed overweight and not very attractive people naked and having sex. But really, so what? It's been interpreted as some kind of laudable corrective to the cosmetic eroticism that Hollywood and the porn industry peddles. It isn't, of course, for the simple reason that the movie overall isn't remotely good enough to mediate the intended visceral impact of lengthy depictions of actual sex. In the context of the story the extended and graphic nature of these scenes is simply as unwarranted as it would have been if the actors were beautiful and glamorous. Admittedly the sexual imagery does provide momentary glimpses of the raw and vulnerable humanity of these people, and had it featured in a more emotionally rounded and professionally told story it might have carried a much greater resonance. As it is, just about everything that happens feels meaningless and remote, because Reygadas evidently has no interest in supplying his audience with any interpretive hooks, and unsurprisingly none of the amateur actors is skilled enough to fully inhabit on screen the bodies that they have so boldly put on display.