Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) (2021)

Orchestral swells and tremulous strings help turn kitchen-table drama into grand operatic melodrama in Pedro Almodóvar's story of two new mothers sharing their experiences of childbirth, but the link between this melodrama and the broader politics Almodóvar bookends the movie with feels pretty tenuous - living without knowing, living with a secret, and correcting past wrongs seem to be the vague thematic bridge.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) (2009)

I think it was the laugh-out-loud melodrama I enjoyed most watching Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, an overwrought carry-on about a blind film writer's affair with an actress, but everything else left me a little cold, including the rush to tie all the nonsense up sensibly in the end.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEES

Live Flesh (Carne Trémula) (1997)

Director Pedro Almodóvar turns Ruth Rendell's psychosexual thriller into a rambling soapy melodrama and turns Rendell's main character, the 38-year-old serial rapist Victor, into a more palatable naif whose inexperience-in-love and obsession with his 'first' results in an incident in which a policeman is shot and ends up a paraplegic.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Everybody Knows (2019)

A joyous wedding celebration in a wine region of Spain turns bad when a guest, the teenaged girl of an Argentinian family, disappears, possibly kidnapped, in Asghar Farhadi's beautifully acted, beautiful-to-look-at, absorbing, but ultimately inconsequential crime drama that spends so long on its sumptuous set-up, there's no time for the mystery except for in a series of lurching scenes in the film's final third in which the plot doesn't so much develop as the audience is perfunctorily caught up on a situation everyone except the audience (and perhaps, unimportantly, one or two other characters) already knows.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Brothers Grimsby (2016)

A scene involving an elephant's uterus is clearly an attempt at the sort of scandalous, much-talked-about comedy that fans of Sacha Baron Cohen have come to expect of his movies but in this terribly tired story that throws mismatched brothers together in a spy caper, the elephant scene comes after so much other not-very-funny dross that it just reeks of last-ditch desperation and Sacha Baron Cohen who is normally so hilarious when his fictional characters spear social issues in real world situations, here flounders in an entire fiction.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Vicky and Cristina, American friends on holiday in Spain, have a pleasant time exploring art galleries and historical sites but when they encounter handsome Spanish painter Juan Antonio and his fiery ex-lover played hilariously by Penelope Cruz, they also end up exploring their notions of love and sex and monogamy, in Woody Allen's riotous comedy drama that features not so much a love triangle as a love square or pentagon!

★★★★☆ 

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Vanilla Sky (2001)

Awful, painfully long-winded "Total Recall" minus the fun and action, preoccupied instead with the psychological anguish of its hero who doesn't know minute to minute what is real, whether he killed one of his girlfriends, or if he has just been "Rekall-ed" by a sinister company called Life Extension.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS