Synopsis
Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.
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Cast
- Antonio BanderasSalvador Mallo
- Asier EtxeandiaAlberto Crespo
- Leonardo SbaragliaFederico Delgado
- Nora NavasMercedes
- Julieta SerranoOld Jacinta
- Penélope CruzJacinta
- César VicenteEduardo
- Asier FloresYoung Salvador
- Cecilia RothZulema
- Susi SánchezPious Woman from Paterna
Recommendations
- 100
The Playlist
A beautiful, full-hearted celebration of the craft of filmmaking. - 91
The Film Stage
This is an especially personal work, anchored by the director’s on-off muse Antonio Banderas in perhaps his greatest performance and sweeps through the Spanish maestro’s recurrent themes: high melodrama and kitsch comedy, piety and carnal lust, sex and death, human pain and transcendent glory. - 91
IndieWire
The filmmaker’s best and most personal movie in years. - 90
Variety
A mature work of meticulously tuned meta-fiction. - 90
Los Angeles Times
But if the tone is more restrained, more elegiac, and lacking that signature Almodóvar outrageousness, the emotional force still knocks you sideways. - 80
The Guardian
As ever, Almodóvar has made a film about pleasure, which is itself a pleasure: witty, intelligent and sensuous. - 63
Slant Magazine
Pedro Almodóvar’s latest only occasionally captures the spry, comedic rhythms and impassioned intensity of his finest work. - 60
The Hollywood Reporter
It’s unlikely to be remembered with any great fondness by all but Almodovar diehards, its self-regarding inwardness suggesting that he’s struggling, as his hero is here, to find something new to say.
