Pedro Almodóvar’s 2019 drama Pain and Glory is a late-career knockout that’s among the great Spanish iconoclast’s most introspective, emotionally candid work. It casts a never-better Antonio Banderas as a surrogate for the director, exploring creativity, physical suffering, addiction and memory with startling vulnerability and poignancy that stings. In Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad), Almodóvar again draws from a highly personal well, but this time dilutes the pathos by splitting his proxy in two — a director wrestling with a script and the fictional filmmaker intended to be its subject.
A return to Spanish-language cinema after his first feature in English, The Room Next Door, Almodóvar’s new movie is a customarily elegant exercise. It’s intricately structured over two timelines two decades apart that fit together like a puzzle; beautifully acted by a cast of both regulars and newcomers; dripping in visual style; and surging with intense melodrama, enveloped in a sumptuously turbulent score by the director’s indispensable longtime composer Alberto Iglesias.
Bitter Christmas
The Bottom Line
More pain, less glory.
