Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar, 2021). Pedro Almodóvar is on solid footing with Parallel Mothers, a film that includes some of his regular preoccupations relating to family, feminism, and the complicated snarl of personal history. He also incorporates considerations of the … Continue reading Then Playing — Parallel Mothers; Drive My Car; The Mitchells vs. the Machines
Green Mansions (Mel Ferrer, 1959). This film contains one of the most spectacular triumvirates of disastrous casting choices I’ve ever seen in a major Hollywood production. Green Mansions adapts a 1904 novel by William Henry Hudson and follows a headstrong … Continue reading Then Playing — Green Mansions; Claudine; Julieta
Bombshell (Jay Roach, 2019). I assume there is noble intent behind the presence last year of two major productions dramatizing the toxic, misogynistic work environment at Fox News. I cant’ speak to the Showtime limited series that covered the same … Continue reading Then Playing — Bombshell; Harriet; Pain and Glory
Recent weeks have seen an online avalanche of top ten lists from movie critics of all stripes. I live in the frigid north, however, and it takes certain cinematic offerings a little longer to fight their way through the sleet and … Continue reading From the Archive: Top Ten Movies of 2006
I’ve been running behind on my music reviews and the studios have been running behind on getting me screeners, so I only had one piece up at Spectrum Culture this week. It was my second contribution to our Best Living Directors series, this time offering an evaluation of Pedro Almodóvar. I wasn’t part of the selection process for our list, but I’m very pleased with it. For one thing, there’s good diversity and a strong sense of history to it. These sorts of tallies are so often of the moment and crassly devoted assembled choices that are perceived as ever … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988). Almodóvar’s international breakthrough is almost quaint in its kitschy simplicity when held up against the rich, lush films that have sprung from his off-kilter cranium in recent years. It involves a tangled web of romantic and sexual relationships, largely converging in a Spanish apartment that has a convenient batch of sedative-laden gazpacho in the fridge. There evidence of Almodóvar’s sterling eye, especially in the earlier scenes, but it’s mostly an engagingly casual farce, played with a relaxation that feels nicely cultural. Carmen Maura is especially good in the lead … Continue reading Almodóvar, Campion, DeBlois and Sanders, Lumet, Pontecorvo
Separate Lies (Julian Fellowes, 2005). Following his Oscar win for scripting Robert Altman’s exemplary Gosford Park, Julian Fellowes made his directorial debut with an adaptation of an an old novel by Nigel Balchin. The film focuses of a busy, distracted solicitor whose marriage begins to fray, a situation compounded when the death of a local man in a hit-and-run car accident brings secrets to light and sets everyone reeling into a series of moral compromises. The stuff of high drama is certainly present in abundance in the story, and with Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson and Rupert Everett at the head … Continue reading Almodóvar, Argott, Butterworth, Fellowes, Scorsese
#33 — Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar, 2004) Pedro Almodovar is one of those directors that rewards those who make their film-going selections on the basis of adherence to the auteur theory. Not every Almodovar film is exceptional, but every one … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Thirty-Three
Coffee for Two 