prolific filmmaker<\/a> who can defend himself from accusations of retreading ground by pointing to the clear evolution in his style and sophistication across his 40-year career\u2014from racy, subversive comedies to female-driven melodramas and dark thrillers that are shocking as they are subdued. Of all the filmmakers competing in this year\u2019s Cannes, he has the most certified bangers under his belt, and he distinguishes Bitter Christmas from Pain & Glory by focusing mostly on a different, more distinctly fictional filmmaker: Elsa (B\u00e1rbara Lennie), a two-time director whose creativity has waned after her films failed to click with audiences and her mother passed away. (Elsa\u2019s story is set in 2004; Ra\u00fal\u2019s in 2025.)<\/p>\nNow, she shoots commercials, and seems satisfied\u2014or at least diverted\u2014by her hunky younger boyfriend Bonifacio (Patrick Criado) who\u2019s a firefighter that moonlights as a stripper. When she suffers from her first panic attack, she is drawn back to writing, distancing herself from her boyfriend \u201cBeau\u201d in a picturesque Lanzarote villa and using the marital woes of her friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo) as inspiration, unable to clock her screenwriting as parasitic because, to her, it feels like rejuvenation.<\/p>\n
If this doesn\u2019t sound massively dramatic, that\u2019s because it isn\u2019t\u2014after the first act introducing Elsa\u2019s comfortable but unfulfilling life, her story only goes in a few limited directions. There\u2019s the fallout with Patricia, followed by her kinship with grieving model Natalia (Milena Smit), all relayed in Almod\u00f3var\u2019s now reflexive late period style: clean, sly angles of actors clad in bright-toned designer clothing, lounging in exquisitely and deliberately designed homes, accompanied by Alberto Iglesias\u2019 pervasive string-heavy score. As before, it creates a unique heightened mood, but it is over-familiar. Still, this story doesn\u2019t need to be independently substantial\u2014it\u2019s all just the story that Ra\u00fal is inventing to save himself from creative drought and to avoid making a high-paying appearance at a festival in Qatar.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In \u201creality,\u201d Ra\u00fal also has a younger, attractive partner, but he uses the fantasy offered by fiction to make his boyfriend a pinch sexier\u2014or maybe, kitschier. In an early Ra\u00fal scene, he visits a strip club with M\u00f3nica to get inspiration; he\u2019s informed by the proprietor that they no longer do stripping there, they\u2019re a full-on sex club. When we see Beau\u2019s act, the way it\u2019s been tamed and tacky-fied for Ra\u00fal\u2019s script is an amusing insight into Almod\u00f3var\u2019s process. (Beau is a firefighter and a stripper? Only a hack or a genius would do this.)<\/p>\n
There are plenty of highlights to Bitter Christmas, which are easy to list but harder to argue their contribution to a powerful whole: Songs by acclaimed Mexican singer Chavela Vargas (including the titular \u201cAmarga Navidad\u2019) are well-deployed; there\u2019s a tender scene where Elsa\u2019s panic attack is calmed by a friend\u2019s singing, moving her and Beau to tears; a nurse asks her filmmaker patient to give a thorough explanation of the \u201ccult film\u201d label. Bitter Christmas doesn\u2019t properly kick into gear until the final act with a mile-a-minute metatextual and mean-spirited duel between spiteful Ra\u00fal and an incandescent M\u00f3nica about the artist having carte blanche over other people\u2019s private lives.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s entertaining because the film\u2019s playful autofiction critiques blend with petty, middle-aged insults, a no-holds-barred duel between two people who\u2019ve known each other for decades. We get only short glimpses into their relationship, but Almod\u00f3var\u2019s wit and the confident performances of Sbaraglia and S\u00e1nchez-Gij\u00f3n create a strong impression of a loving but wearied relationship. Alas, this lightning bolt of sizzling conflict comes far too late, and the moment where the credits roll ought to be the film\u2019s midpoint. Bitter Christmas uncomfortably straddles its twin goals of complexity and amusement, too pithy to take seriously and too flat to be riotously entertained.<\/p>\n
Director: Pedro Almod\u00f3var
Writer: Pedro Almod\u00f3var
Starring: B\u00e1rbara Lennie, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Aitana S\u00e1nchez-Gij\u00f3n, Victoria Luengo, Patrick Criado, Milena Smit, Quim Guti\u00e9rrez
Release Date: May 19, 2026 (Cannes)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How do you respond when a filmmaker announces to the audience that his latest film is a minor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-439016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}