Pedro Almodóvar should fit right in at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which was full of films that went over the top and deal with transgressive topics and lots of sex. After all, the Spanish director has been doing that kind of thing for decades. Almodóvar 20th film, “Julieta,” is inspired by three short stories from the Alice Munro book “Runaway.” And perhaps surprisingly, it didn’t really fit with this year’s lurid Cannes titles like “Slack Bay,” “The Handmaiden,” “Staying Vertical” and “American Honey” — by comparison with those films, Almodóvar has relinquished his role as the prince of transgression.
- 12/21/2016
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
Manuel here catching up with Pedro's latest at the New York Film Festival
Following the New York Film Festival screening of his 20th film, Pedro Almodóvar admitted that, in adapting Alice Munro’s short stories (from her collection, Runaway), he had aimed for a more restrained tone. Indeed, especially in comparison to his previous outing—the mile high club comedy I’m So Excited!—Julieta is an aggressively austere affair. Of course, “austere Almodóvar” is still inimitably Almodóvar. Take the film’s first shot: we’re awash in a sea of red fabric. It looks like draperie, perhaps a bedsheet or even a curtain. It pulses like a heart...
Following the New York Film Festival screening of his 20th film, Pedro Almodóvar admitted that, in adapting Alice Munro’s short stories (from her collection, Runaway), he had aimed for a more restrained tone. Indeed, especially in comparison to his previous outing—the mile high club comedy I’m So Excited!—Julieta is an aggressively austere affair. Of course, “austere Almodóvar” is still inimitably Almodóvar. Take the film’s first shot: we’re awash in a sea of red fabric. It looks like draperie, perhaps a bedsheet or even a curtain. It pulses like a heart...
- 10/5/2016
- by Manuel Betancourt
- FilmExperience
Told in flashback over 30 years of guilt and grief, this tender melodrama based on three Alice Munro short stories is Pedro Almodóvar’s best film in a decade
Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, his most moving and entrancing work since 2006’s Volver, is a sumptuous and heartbreaking study of the viral nature of guilt, the mystery of memory and the often unendurable power of love. At times, the emotional intrigue plays more like a Hitchcock thriller than a romantic melodrama, with Alberto Iglesias’s superb Herrmannesque score (the director cites Toru Takemitsu, Mahler and Alban Berg as influential) heightening the noir elements, darkening the bold splashes of red, blue and white. Three short stories from the Canadian author Alice Munro’s 2004 volume Runaway provide the source material, but the spirit of Patricia Highsmith looms large as strangers on a train fuel the circling narrative (one character even observes that...
Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, his most moving and entrancing work since 2006’s Volver, is a sumptuous and heartbreaking study of the viral nature of guilt, the mystery of memory and the often unendurable power of love. At times, the emotional intrigue plays more like a Hitchcock thriller than a romantic melodrama, with Alberto Iglesias’s superb Herrmannesque score (the director cites Toru Takemitsu, Mahler and Alban Berg as influential) heightening the noir elements, darkening the bold splashes of red, blue and white. Three short stories from the Canadian author Alice Munro’s 2004 volume Runaway provide the source material, but the spirit of Patricia Highsmith looms large as strangers on a train fuel the circling narrative (one character even observes that...
- 8/28/2016
- by Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
- The Guardian - Film News
Passion and intrigue are threaded through this elegant story of memory and motherhood, but the director withholds too much of the plot
A new film by Pedro Almodóvar is always an event, and his latest drama has much of the richness and warmth of his best work, the emotional intelligence, the luxurious colour and texture. Julieta has won golden opinions on the festival circuit, and it is more substantial than his wacky airline farce I’m So Excited! from 2013. But it’s not quite my favourite of his recent work, and even after two viewings I still find it opaque and oblique, heading to a confrontation that appears to happen after the film has finished. Yet there are unmissably gorgeous moments of passion and intrigue.
This is an adaptation of three inter-related short stories by Alice Munro from her 2004 collection Runaway: Chance, Soon and Silence, a concatenation that partly...
A new film by Pedro Almodóvar is always an event, and his latest drama has much of the richness and warmth of his best work, the emotional intelligence, the luxurious colour and texture. Julieta has won golden opinions on the festival circuit, and it is more substantial than his wacky airline farce I’m So Excited! from 2013. But it’s not quite my favourite of his recent work, and even after two viewings I still find it opaque and oblique, heading to a confrontation that appears to happen after the film has finished. Yet there are unmissably gorgeous moments of passion and intrigue.
This is an adaptation of three inter-related short stories by Alice Munro from her 2004 collection Runaway: Chance, Soon and Silence, a concatenation that partly...
- 8/25/2016
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
The colours – and the women – pop in the Spanish auteur’s adaptation of three Alice Munro stories, but there’s something intentionally unsatisfying at the heart of this minor work
Pedro Almodóvar’s intriguing, minor work Julieta is an adaptation of three inter-related short stories by Alice Munro from her 2004 collection Runaway: Chance, Soon and Silence. It elegantly revives Almodovár’s signature tropes and repertory cast favourites, circling around ideas of yearning, memory and loss. This is a movie which almost seems to happen at one remove from itself, unfolding as so many of his others in flashback, disclosed by letters and journals, a movie in which vitally important things happen off camera, including an extraordinarily painful revelation almost casually thrown away in the dying moments.
It’s all about mothers, all about transformation, all about people in comas, or nearly in comas — that last idea being one which...
Pedro Almodóvar’s intriguing, minor work Julieta is an adaptation of three inter-related short stories by Alice Munro from her 2004 collection Runaway: Chance, Soon and Silence. It elegantly revives Almodovár’s signature tropes and repertory cast favourites, circling around ideas of yearning, memory and loss. This is a movie which almost seems to happen at one remove from itself, unfolding as so many of his others in flashback, disclosed by letters and journals, a movie in which vitally important things happen off camera, including an extraordinarily painful revelation almost casually thrown away in the dying moments.
It’s all about mothers, all about transformation, all about people in comas, or nearly in comas — that last idea being one which...
- 5/17/2016
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
It’s panning out to be a significantly different type of experience with regards to filmmaker Liza Johnson’s sophomore film. After stumbling out with her debut Return, a painfully difficult indie film that premiered in Cannes (Directors’ Fortnight) and whimpered into theaters, the helmer quickly got behind the camera with a plethora of talent for Hateship Loveship, which managed to charm the IFC Films’ Arianna Bocco during Tiff – landing a theatrical distribution deal which will probably set the dramedy for a 2014 showing.
Gist: Based on a short story by Alice Munro with a screenplay by Mark Poirier, Kristen Wiig stars as Johanna Parry, a profoundly shy, unadorned woman who is hired by Mr. McCauley (Nick Nolte) as a housekeeper and a primary caregiver to his granddaughter Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld). When Sabitha uses technology to foster a pseudo-relationship between her widowed father and new caretaker, Johanna is finally able to...
Gist: Based on a short story by Alice Munro with a screenplay by Mark Poirier, Kristen Wiig stars as Johanna Parry, a profoundly shy, unadorned woman who is hired by Mr. McCauley (Nick Nolte) as a housekeeper and a primary caregiver to his granddaughter Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld). When Sabitha uses technology to foster a pseudo-relationship between her widowed father and new caretaker, Johanna is finally able to...
- 9/17/2013
- by Eric Lavallee
- IONCINEMA.com
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