Iglesias Más/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
Strange Way of Life (2023)
They don't even kiss; not their current counterparts, anyway. Silva (Pedro Pascal) and Jake (Ethan Hawke) were young cowboys together, and together in every sense of the word. Now Jake is a sheriff and Silva a rancher; and their meeting for the first time in 25 years is due to the awkward fact that Silva's son, Joe (George Steane), has killed Jake's sister-in-law. Has Silva decided to leverage the past in order to save his son? Or is there something else going on?
Continue reading “Sparring Partners” »
MOVIE REVIEW
I'm So Excited! (2013)
Paola Ardizzoni and Emilio Pereda/
Sony Pictures Classics
Hanging an apparent left turn from his recent forays into melodrama of various flavors, Pedro Almodóvar re-embraces high-camp farce with a vengeance in "I'm So Excited!," along with the chance to regrumble his annoyance at the current state of his home country. The result is occasionally something like oxygen starvation. In Mr. Almodóvar's very broad-brush comedy, a variety of hapless and horny characters cocooned in the business class cabin of a Peninsula Airlines flight set about coupling, confessing and — in the Kenneth Williams sense — carrying on. A raft of Mr. Almodóvar's regulars pass along the aisles, including Cecilia Roth as a former dominatrix with the dirt on Spain's elite and Lola Dueñas as a vaguely psychic virgin with a bad case of peninsula envy. Flagrant fragrant archetypes all.
Continue reading “Fly the Overfriendly Skies” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Skin I Live In (2011)
José Haro/Sony Pictures Classics
“The Skin I Live In” seemingly has the key ingredients of Pedro Almodóvar’s greatest hits: sex reassignment, a crazed fugitive copulating in a tiger costume, Marisa Paredes and, most importantly, Antonio Banderas. Since packing up for Hollywood nearly two decades ago, Mr. Banderas hadn’t looked back. But in between the “Shrek,” the “Spy Kids” and the “Mask of Zorro” franchises, his career had been a blur. Unimpeded by a stumbling accent this time, Mr. Banderas delivers his finest performance in recent memory and reminds us of the world-class leading man he is.
Continue reading “The Mask of Sorrow” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Broken Embraces (2009)
Emilio Pereda and Paola Ardizzoni/
Sony Pictures Classics
Since the triumphant “All About My Mother,” Pedro Almodóvar has spent the last 10 years making middlebrow melodramas and noirs. In other words, he hasn’t been making those sexy, hysterical and fun movies that first garnered him attention stateside two decades ago. Then again, having a male character in drag was bold and flamboyant in the 1980s. It’s cliché in 2009 — hello, Ang Lee — and even Mr. Almodóvar knows this.
Continue reading “The Flour of His Secret” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Headless Woman (2008)
Strand Releasing
An existential mystery about an amnesiac woman reorienting herself back to her world after sustaining a head trauma in a car accident, Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s “The Headless Woman” challenges our perceptions of class, gender, profession, memory and the interpersonal relationships that collectively form our identities. Mesmerizingly sweeping and hazy, the film follows Verónica (María Onetto) as she attempts to fake her way back into her marriage, job and daily routines as if everything is just fine, thank you. We gather clues to her former self by watching her passively allowing everyone in her life to take the lead in every interaction. But while she seems to be successfully fooling her family, friends and colleagues, Verónica loses her grip on reality when she comes to believe that she has accidentally killed someone in the very car accident that erased her memory.
Continue reading “A Woman Under the Voidance” »