This was a year of firsts for Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar, making his first English-language feature after 25 years of teasing and, with it, bagging the main prize at a major international film festival — Venice’s Golden Lion — for the first time in a career spanning nearly half a century. The film in question is The Room Next Door, also a milestone of sorts since it marks the first time its spectacular leading ladies, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, have worked together on screen.

Based, or perhaps one should say extracted, from Ingrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, the film stars Julianne Moore as Ingrid Parker, a novelist who is unexpectedly reunited with her old friend Martha Hunt (Tilda Swinton). A former war reporter, Martha is now fighting a losing battle with cancer. Tired of getting false hope from ineffective experimental treatments, Martha enlists Ingrid’s help in...