Very Gay Film/Very Straight Guy: "Bad Education"

For pride month, straight critic Ben Miller takes a look back at a gay film he otherwise would have never seen.

Much of the experience of taking in film is seeing yourself in the characters and situations. Part of why I wanted to write this series is for something exactly like this. Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education is completely foreign to me (no pun intended for the Spanish language). Every male character is either gay, transgender, or sexually fluid. If you are none of those things, how do you connect?

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Cannes: "La Bola Negra (The Black Ball)"

by Elisa Giudici

The cast of LA BOLA NEGRA

By now, the Los Javis hardly need introduction at Cannes. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, who just tied Pawel Pawlikowski to win Best Director at the Cannes closing ceremony, have spent the last decade becoming not just successful filmmakers and showrunners, but cultural architects for a new generation of Spanish storytelling: proudly queer, emotionally maximalist, deeply rooted in national history while fully conversant in pop melodrama and contemporary television language. If Veneno made them unavoidable and La Mesías confirmed their creative ambition, La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) arrives as the film where they attempt to canonize themselves.

The scale alone announces the shift. Produced under the banner of El Deseo (the Almodóvar brothers’ company, also in Competition this year with Pedro’s latest) La Bola Negra carries the unmistakable aura of succession mythology around it. Not a rejection of the Almodóvar lineage so much as a generational mutation of it...

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Cannes: Pedro Almodovar's "Bitter Christmas" plays a dangerous artistic game

by Elisa Giudici

Leonardo Sbaraglia stars in 'BITTER CHRISTMAS'

Pedro Almodóvar has spent the last few years stripping away the protective layers between himself and his cinema. Ever since Pain and Glory, his films have stopped merely borrowing from autobiography and started openly feeding on it. The characters no longer resemble fragments of the director; they practically announce themselves as extensions of him. Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad) pushes that process to an almost uncomfortable extreme. It is simultaneously a film about artistic exhaustion, physical decline, creative addiction, and the terror of becoming irrelevant while still alive enough to notice it happening.

For much of its runtime, though, the film appears to be failing. Scenes drift without urgency. Narrative threads open and dissipate. Characters talk endlessly without ever fully arriving anywhere emotionally. Even desire, once the volatile lifeblood of Almodóvar’s cinema, feels strangely absent, reduced to memory, routine, residue. Watching Amarga Navidad, it becomes difficult not to wonder whether this is simply what late-period decline looks like: a legendary filmmaker trapped inside diminished versions of his former obsessions. That uneasy sensation turns out to be the film’s central provocation...

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Randomness... 1987 (Part 1)

by Nathaniel R

BROADCAST NEWS (1987)

Once we reached the late 80s young Nathaniel was fully immersed in Oscar passions so there are less glaring omissions in films screened. Why am I talking about myself in the third person? Nevertheless 1987 is now so long ago that I really wonder about my initial take on so many of the movies. For instance, a lot of people I respect think very highly of The Dead – and it even gets a very loving homage in Almodovar’s current film The Room Next Door. I remember it as a high minded, intermittently potent drama but also kind of dull. It’s probable I was too young for it at the time (I did see it in theaters…and went specifically because Anjelica Huston had won the Oscar the previous year for 1985’s Prizzi’s Honor so I was in the flushes of new fandom). But we’re jumping ahead of ourselves.

NATHANIEL’S TOP TEN OF 1987 

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TIFF '24: The Art of Dying in One's Own Terms

by Cláudio Alves

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR won the Golden Lion on the same day it first screened at TIFF.
Whether programmed with that intention or bonded by coincidence, one can often find films in conversation at festivals. Echoed themes and varied approaches to the same idea occur, often across sections, tying works together that were never meant to be considered in those terms. Some might disagree, but I find it to be a valuable experience, oft conducive to deeper thought, comparison and contrast. At this year's TIFF, for example, mortality was on many an artist's mind, from Godard, knowingly at the end of his rope, to the apocalyptic visions of Oppenheimer, Ostrikov, and Thibault Emin. From Cannes, there came meditations from Cronenberg and Schrader, films laden with grief, loss, and the need to take control. In documentary land, there are the recollections of an erstwhile death row inmate in The Freedom of Fierro.

Still, the most apparent conversation partners were two Spanish filmmakers, Pedro Almodóvar and Carlos Marques-Marcet, telling two euthanasia stories in The Room Next Door and They Will Be Dust…

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