It’s easy to grumble that, since the ascension of streaming, everything is content now. Art-house films, blockbusters, documentaries, limited series, multi-season dramas, standup specials, even news broadcasts — they’re all items in a queue, presented for your enjoyment or consigned to oblivion on the caprices of an algorithm. Some of them take longer than others to finish, and … [Read more...]
‘Pain and Glory’: Almodóvar’s marvelous memory film
“In the cinema of my childhood, it always smells of piss … and of jasmine, and of summer breezes.” It’s a line so good it appears twice — or is it three times? — in Pedro Almodóvar’s tender new memory film, Pain and Glory. Tactile in its descriptiveness, and elegant in its poetic juxtaposition — in the lovely ellipsis separating the pungent and the perfumed — it struck me … [Read more...]
‘Julieta’: Mature, sorrowful, moving Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar’s few id-tamped, grown-up movies are rarely the ones we remember. And the release of each of them, harking most recently to Volver, yields the usual critical musings about a renegade mellowing — an enfant terrible maturing into an elder statesman. Enter the uncharacteristic sparseness of his latest, Julieta, which Almodóvar adapted from a seemingly … [Read more...]