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Broken Embraces

Penélope Cruz and José Luis Gómez in <i>Broken Embraces</i>

My review of Broken Embraces is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

The box describes Broken Embraces as an “acclaimed tale of sex, secrets and cinema,” which makes me go, “Uh-oh.” Pedro Almodóvar reliably delivers heady blends of glamour, melodrama, and emotional turmoil, but such stuff still runs hot and cold from movie to movie. So although I liked his Bad Education, a film that was all about “sex, secrets and cinema,” the prospect of Almodóvar returning to the tortured-filmmaker well filled me with trepidation.

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Timecrimes

1280_timecrimes.jpgTimecrimes, a clever piece of storytelling from Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo, is all about Héctor (Karra Elejalde), a middle-aged man just moved with his wife, Clara (Candela Fernández) into a new countryside home. When the film opens, Héctor is already exhausted, but by the time it’s over he’ll be utterly drained, having lived through an extended ordeal with the sustained intention of trying to put his increasingly fractured life back together.

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