Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.
Pain and Glory is one of Almodóvar's most personal and refined works. Antonio Banderas delivers a career-best performance, earning a well-above-average acting score for his restrained, deeply felt portrayal of Salvador. The cinematography by José Luis Alcaine is lush and precisely composed, with Almodóvar's signature use of color reaching near its peak expressiveness. The plot, while moving and beautifully rendered, is fairly familiar territory — a semi-autobiographical meditation on memory, aging, and creative paralysis — and doesn't push into unexpected narrative ground. Novelty sits at above-average: the film has a very distinctive Almodóvar voice and elegance, but it revisits themes and stylistic choices from his earlier work (All About My Mother, Bad Education), making it feel more like a refined culmination than a singular departure. The ending is emotionally resonant but somewhat expected in its revelatory framing device, landing as above average rather than exceptional.