In 1973, the remarkably anti-prolific director released his first feature-length project, The Spirit of the Beehive, a film which was quickly hailed as being the single greatest work of cinema in Spanish history and is still frequently cited as such to this very day. Rubbish and hyperbole, I respond. Plainly, it is only the second-best […]

Woody Allen’s projects aren’t films so much as they are changes in the weather: sometimes delightful, sometimes annoying, nothing that anybody says or does can do much to change them, and they occur in a roughly annual cycle. With that in mind (extremely strained metaphor to follow), his latest feature, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is like […]

By the time we get to the scene where a wealthy widower has drugged his niece, a nun-in-training wearing his dead wife’s bridal grown, and is nuzzling her breasts with his face while she lies as still as a corpse, it’s pretty clear that Viridiana is a sort of unique movie. By the time, about […]

There’s a peculiar flatness to The Orphanage, sort of a half-finished feeling like everyone involved knew what the Themes and Meanings of the film were supposed to be, but just stubbed it in and saved the hard work for another day. I have absolutely no doubt that the film is “about” the fears of being […]

In 1932, the avant-garde Spanish radical dramatist/poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote the first in a trilogy of “rural plays,” Blood Wedding, an exploration of gender roles and social identity. It remains one of his best-known works. In 1980, noted flamenco choreographer Antonio Gades turned this play into a one-act ballet, streamlining the plot and jettisoning […]

I want very badly to call Volver the best film I’ve seen in 2006, and it might actually be the best film I’ve seen in 2006, but the problem is that it’s simultaneously the worst film by Pedro Almodóvar in almost ten years, and somehow, that manages to quash it. The bigotry of high expectations. […]