Any couple considering attending a screening of Olivia Wilde’s racy new dramedy The Invite should be forewarned. For all of its effective humor and risqué dialogue, the film is a certifiable anti-date movie, part of a cinematic lineage of dyspeptic relationships that stretches back to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Scenes from a Marriage and Husbands and Wives. As in these … [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...]