In a tender moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, the opener of this year’s Venice Film Festival, the older of the eponymous mothers teaches the other how to peel potatoes while wearing a t-shirt that says “We Should All Be Feminists.” Since Janis (Penélope Cruz) is at the cusp of middle age, whereas Ana (Milena Smit) has only just turned 18, there’s a suggestion of baton-passing in this Jeanne Dielman reference. One wonders, then, what Chantal Akerman might have thought of the scene in which Ana relates, with a casualness pitched ambiguously between PTSD and nonchalance, that her pregnancy was […]

Are you looking for a trusted, socially-distanced source to provide you with semi-regular cultural recommendation links during this time of pandemic? Okay, well, I’m not really either. My inbox too is full of check-ins and missives from journalists and curators seeking to maintain a digital relationship by supplying Netflix watchlists and the like during this awful interregnum. So consider these posts as much an activity for me as you as I revive this column by highlighting a few things that may provide some degree of interest, empathy or wisdom. Some things to shift your attention away from the cable news […]

Notwithstanding the many awards seasons and release campaigns he’s endured in the United States, the manufactured climate of hotels and restaurants in Los Angeles still makes Spanish cinema idol Pedro Almodóvar uncomfortable. “Everywhere we go here is freezing,” he says as he sits down to talk and scrambles to find something warm to cover himself with.  It’s as if the coldness of these spaces he’s walked repeatedly over the years brings a sensory memory, one that he should have anticipated but still surprises him. Like so, we’ve come to expect a colorful aesthetic brand and tonal irreverence from an Almodóvar […]

For P&I-accredited attendees without the scratch to make it to Berlin/Cannes/Venice (let alone Telluride, with its $780 cost of press entry), day one of TIFF is traditionally a marathon catch-up march through their biggest titles, often scheduled in competing Sophie’s choice slots, with the big-name world premiere titles coming later. All this year’s Cannes main slate awardees are in the program minus two (the pointed omissions are Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe and the Dardennes’ Young Ahmed). This year’s Palme d’Or went to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which is fine by me: he certainly deserves some kind of significant honorific at this point. Bong’s career […]

The following interview of Pedro Almodovar about his film Kika appeared in our Spring, 1994 issue. It is being reprinted here online for the first time. In addition to pumping (very bright red) new blood into Spanish film after Franco’s death, Pedro Almodovar has also blazed the path for a camp style that has been followed around the world. Mixing together high fashion, television melodrama, comic strips, and street corner pornography, Almodovar has spun off stories as tangled and absurd as they are have been uncannily close in capturing a particular moment of Spanish history. Now on the way to […]

From Filmmaker‘s archives, and online for the first time, here is our interview with Pedro Almodovar about All About My Mother as well as many other things, including Tennessee Williams, rejecting primary colors and the difficulties, sometimes, of being “Almodovar.” This piece originally ran in our Fall, 1999 issue. “Mainly women,” says Leo, the desperate, devastated, lovelorn romance writer played by Marisa Paredes in Pedro Almodovar’s eleventh feature film, The Flower of My Secret. “Adventurous, suicidal lunatics.” He might as well be talking about the characters found in Almodovar’s films, for his is a body of work dominated by actresses, […]

Pablo Larraín really and seriously screws up for the first time with Neruda. Few saw or recall the existence of his debut, 2006’s Fuga, which received a middling response on the festival circuit; I seem to recall interviews around the time of 2008’s amusingly appalling (and vice-versa) reputation-establisher Tony Manero where Larraín said Fuga‘s indifferent reception prompted him to rethink a rather conventional aesthetic and come up with something inescapably different. Each film since his coming-out has, in variously scabrous ways, dealt with Pinochet’s legacy: Manero and Post Mortem taking place at the moment of his coup, the late-’80s-set No a crowdpleasingly cynical comedy re: the political machinations around the dictator’s removal via referendum. Jumping to the present, The […]

Pedro Almodóvar was in fine and very funny form last year with I’m So Excited, which comes out today on DVD and Blu-ray. Writing about I’m So Excited on the Filmmaker website, R. Kurt Osenlund wrote, “A dizzyingly sexual lark of a comedy, and Almodóvar’s fizziest film to date, the movie goes down with the mood-lightening and belt-loosening ease of the mescaline-spiked Valencia cocktails its lead characters guzzle. As has been widely reported, I’m So Excited is a throwback to the sort of telenovela-tinged comedies the director hasn’t made in years (think Airline Passengers on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), […]

“What do you think?” asks an inquisitive Pedro Almodóvar, his voice hoarse from constant interviews and his white hair characteristically untamed, like he’s the Don King of foreign film. His question is in response to my own, about why he’s fascinated with sex between partners wherein one of them is asleep, a phenomenon seen in Bad Education and the director’s libidinous, screwball latest, I’m So Excited. It’s at once jarring, thrilling, and humbling to have Almodóvar request your thoughts on his creative motives. Perhaps I should have asked him something else, something less tied to the many interpretations he himself […]

“On a set I feel like the strongest person in the world,” says Mikael Buch, quickly adding, “In real life, things are far more complicated!” Buch’s new film, Let My People Go!, is his first full-length feature. But in directing and co-writing this frisky combination of sexual farce, romantic comedy, and family drama revolving around a young, gay, Jewish Frenchman named Ruben (Nicolas Maury) and his international misadventures, Buch had some stalwart support, including co-writer Christophe Honoré and actor Carmen Maura (of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown fame). “All these people gave me the confidence I needed,” says […]