Sydney Morning Herald
A masterful, melancholy, tender, lacerating self-examination, filled with colour and light and the ghosts of those he has loved. Almodovar at 70, and perhaps astonishing to himself, continues to grow.
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Pain and Glory
Pedro Almodóvar reunites with Antonio Banderas (who scored Best Actor for this role at Cannes 2019) and Penélope Cruz in a reflection on cinema, art, family, love and sexual awakening.
"Banderas, in one of his very finest performances, plays Salvador Mallo, who has a fair few things in common with Pedro Almodóvar. Suffering from a range of health issues, Salvador finds himself in a creative rut. He lacks the physical strength to make a film, and this inability to create makes him more depressed. This artistic limbo leads Salvador to reflect on his life, his loves and his films. Pain and Glory goes back in time to Salvador’s childhood, where he was raised, in poverty, in a cave modelled into a house by his doting mother (Cruz). In the present, a reunion with an actor he has long been estranged from leads to an addiction to heroin. Amidst the pain, there are thoughts of past glories, and those hopefully to come, in a film that arrives at a resolute position of hope." (Sydney Film Festival)
Best Actor (Banderas) and Best Composer (Alberto Iglesias), Cannes 2019
2019Rating: M, Science fiction themes, violence and coarse language113 minsSpainSpanish with English subtitles
DramaWorld CinemaFestival & Independent
- Director:
- Pedro Almodóvar ('Talk to Her', 'Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown', 'Volver')
- Writer:
- Pedro Almodóvar
- Cast:
- Antonio BanderasPenélope CruzLeonardo SbaragliaAsier EtxeandiaCecilia RothRaúl ArévaloNora NavasJulieta Serrano
Pain and Glory / Reviews
Stuff
Pain and Glory is a beautiful film. It is savagely funny at times, achingly melancholic at others. If you are a fan of Almodovar already, just know that this is one of his strongest films of the last decade at least.
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Time Magazine
Everything about Pain and Glory is awake and alive, and Almodóvar's nerve endings become ours, too.
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The Times
The hangdog expression is riven with pain, and [Banderas] plays Mallo as emotionally cauterised yet beneath it all still desperate to connect, to love and to make more films.
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The Guardian
There is something incomplete or unfinished in this work, but perhaps this simply represents the condition of life itself. Pain and Glory leaves you with a sweet sadness, but a sharp appetite for the next film.
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Screen Daily
The effect is a patchwork rather than an interwoven whole; the wistfully self-reflexive tone will appeal to fans of the less emphatic, more meditative end of the Almodovar spectrum.
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Los Angeles Times
However loosely "Pain and Glory" may play with the facts, it never feels less than truthful.
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Hollywood Reporter
Indeed watching the film, which is more about pain than glory, sometimes feels a little too much like a couple of hours in the company of your ailing, aged aunt: You feel her pain, but you wish she wouldn't go on about it so much.
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