Nice effects though.

Fantastic!

Best movie ever!

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

In Madrid, the middle-aged Julieta (Emma Suárez) is packing her books to move to Portugal with her boyfriend Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti). She goes shopping for the journey and stumbles upon Bea (Michelle Jenner), who was the best friend of her missing daughter Antia. They talk to each other and Bea discloses that Antia is married with three children. Julieta decides to stay in Madrid; breaks with Lorenzo; and rents an apartment in her former building, hoping that Antia contacts her. She decides to write the heartbreaking story of her life since she was a young woman and met her beloved future husband and Antia´s father Xoan (Daniel Grao) until the losses of Xoan and Antia. "Julieta" is a dramatic romance by Pedro Almodóvar in a conventional style totally different from most of his previous works, since it is neither tacky nor aggressive to the Catholic Church; and using neither bright colors nor bizarre characters. Indeed it is a mature work disclosing the story of a middle-aged depressed woman that has her life affected for the loss of her beloved husband first and the last twelve years for the disappearance of her eighteen year-old daughter. The most important, the powerful drama never becomes a melodramatic soap-opera. The screenplay is very well-written with a perfect open end and magnificent cast. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Julieta"

Before the end credits rolled out, my feeling was "At last a great film from Almodovar with a mesmerizing performance from Emma Suarez as the older Julieta." That feeling, unfortunately, was short lived. Almodovar had not written the story--many of his other works are his own. Almodovar had merely adapted the stories of Nobel Prize winning Canadian author Alice Munro. I have never read Munro to date but the depth of the story line urges me to do so fast. She is great!The film is also memorable for Emma Suarez' screen presence as the older Julieta. So was the choice of the music and the paintings used in the film. This is for me the most likable Almodovar film and yet it does not belong to him: it belongs to the Canadian lady. One got the feeling you were watching the filmed version of a modern day Dostoyevsky without the religion and Russian connections. Anyway thanks to you Mr Almodovar for your decision to make this film as also to Ms Sarah Polley for making "Away from Her," some 10 years ago, another film that used the writings of Ms. Munro.

One of the best things about seeing the latest Almodóvar movie is being immersed in a world that is not America. The scenery, the characters, the daily life and overall traditions are from the director's Spanish realm. After several decades of his movies, we anticipate what he's going to present us next, for it will be something that holds our attention and makes us laugh or think. Above all, it will be the latest unveiling of an artist's work.Music plays a dominant role in Julieta, composed by Alberto Iglesias, a familiar collaborator of Almodóvar. The tone and atmosphere of the music as the movie opens set the stage for the coming content, and it's dark, almost haunting, and subtly ominous. Its predominant characteristic expresses the dead feeling of depression. It always stays just below the line where life percolates, and over the course of the story at key moments rises just enough to deliver suspense but still remains under that non-living line. Without the music's role in the story arc, the tale's simplicity and the camera's slow study of Julieta's state of mind might have resulted in a dull film, for as Orson Welles once said: "Films should be able to tell you a story quicker than any other medium." But Julieta succeeds in its objective of studying a woman's loss, and loss is not something easily captured in words. The visual portrayal of loss has more power, and Emma Suárez, who plays the middle-aged Julieta, holds us still in our witnessing of her static grief, which is depression. Julieta is loosely based on three short stories by the Canadian Nobel Prize–winner Alice Munro. The stories have been moved to a Spanish milieu and processed through the imagination of Spain's greatest filmmaker. The opening music shares the screen with sensual red folds of fabric that then wrap a contemporary sculpture of a terracotta man with an over-sized pipe for a penis. An important blue envelope is thrown into the trash. We come to understand that Julieta is moving, packing and throwing out, cutting ties to her past. Her boyfriend, an art critic Lorenzo, arrives and their brief conversation tells us they are a happy couple moving to Portugal. In the next scene, Julieta encounters Bea, her daughter Antía's closest childhood friend, and learns that Antía lives in Como. We witness Julieta's stunned and ravaged face as she grasps onto this news of her daughter, and from that moment on, the movie delves into the past and how Julieta lost contact with Antía. She ends her plans to move to Portugal with Lorenzo. She rents an available apartment in the same building where she and Antía once lived on the off chance that Antía will try to reach her after thirteen years. She sits down, opens a large notebook, and begins writing to Antía the story of what happened to them. This narrative becomes the story of the movie, with Adriana Ugarte playing the younger, bombshell Julieta.Colors mark the movie, deep saturated colors that deliver mystery and mood, or flamboyant colors like young Julieta's shock of bleached hair and her bright facial make-up and clothing. We're treated to idyllic seaside views of her lover Xoan's home—he's a hunky Galician fisherman played by Daniel Grao. The terra-cotta figure with pipe penis seems to symbolize him, for the hottest passion imaginable strikes these two characters at the beginning of Julieta's memoir to Antía, and results in Antía's conception and the future of the family. Just the way the music is almost ominous, almost sinister, Xoan's housekeeper Maria (Inma Cuesta) fills us with uneasiness—is she good or bad? Her face when dealing with Julieta is cold and inscrutable, possibly plotting evil, but later with the teenage Antía, she shows her warmth and affection. This kind of suspense in character and music keeps us waiting for something to happen, and though something does, a tragedy, a loss, it's not violent or visually traumatic. It's depression.The movie successfully explores depression caused by tragedy and loss. Perhaps the ambivalence an audience might feel when the movie ends has to do with not really feeling close to Julieta or Antía, despite comprehending their interior worlds through their facial and physical communication. We remain on the objective, viewing side of a situation, our minds involved but not our hearts, as if the work is a study. It's an incongruity in the movie that Xoan's home and Julieta's Madrid apartments are upper middle class in furnishings and possessions. She comes from a teacher's background and Xoan is a fisherman, but their lifestyle, and her outfits, couldn't be more bourgeois. Those furnishings for the characters stand out and remove the viewer from the willing suspension of disbelief. For Almodóvar fans, Julieta will be worth seeing as the latest from an artist's oeuvre, but it won't be as powerful as Bad Education (about Catholic-priest sex abuse) or Talk to Her (about friendship and love), or even, for those who can take it, the macabre thriller The Skin I Live In.

Adapt delicate writer Alice Munro's three short stories, take her heroine Juliet, and mix with hyperbolic writer-director Pedro Almodovar channeling Alfred Hitchcock, and you have one heck of a romantic thriller, Julieta. I realize the Spanish setting, not Munro's Canada, turns the screw of lyricism very tight, but it is after all as flamboyant, colorful (full of figurative blood reds) and, female-loving as any other of his films.As we come to know our reasonably-reliable narrator, Julieta (Emma Suarez), we discover a mature but lonely woman whose pain will be incrementally exposed to us but not too soon. She breaks the linear underpinnings of the story to take us by flashback to her younger self (Adriana Ugarte) and the birth of her eventually-estranged daughter, Antia (Priscilla Delgado, adolescent and Blanca Peres, 18 years old).Almodovar is not in a rush to reveal the toll on Julieta for her daughter's absence, and that is the beauty of this romantic drama, where her pain, loss, and guilt form a seamless portrait of a woman on a journey to self discovery. Like Odysseus (The Odyssey is alluded to in one of her young teacher sequences), only after serious confrontation with her selfishness and self-centered libido does she see the central role she plays in the seemingly random vicissitudes of life.The sea plays a its lyrical presence as well as its danger (like women): "The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea" Matthew Arnold.While women do the heavy emotional lifting and seem to hold the plot strings, as typical of Almodovar, men are actually prominent players, from a suicidal train passenger across the seat from her and a manly fisherman, Xoan (Daniel Grao) in the dining car to a splendidly-attentive writer, Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti—reminding me of Frank Langella). Without them only the loss of her daughter would not a complete drama make.A statue of a male with a powerful penis plays a part in the proceedings, suggesting the integral part sexuality plays in lives. The lesbian leitmotif is a reminder that not all sex is heterosexual nor is it without consequences, as we're reminded that existentially everyone gets what he deserves.In the end, it's women Almodovar pursues and loves with splashes of red in cars, clothes, and cakes to show female passion and his poetry. As in the current thriller Elle, these European directors can tell a whopper of a story starring women of a certain age hotter than about any young thing you can think of.The blonde in trouble and the Bernard-Hermann-like score, coupled with the puzzle-like story, may recall Hitchcock, but what we do know from both directors is never to take the vulnerable ladies for granted and always savor their depth of feeling in lives painful but eminently worth living.Almodovar is a director with an artist's eye and an unbounded affection for women Hitchcock would envy. See this film to experience just what European directors can achieve without cheap sex, gratuitous violence, or distracting special effects.