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Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

My interest in Almodovar is rather muted. He doesn't excel in any of the ways of presenting the world that really matter to me but he does several things more than well, so every so often I visit. There is the desire to submerge ourselves in fiction, lose ourselves to self in order to wake to a fabric that extends from self. That's Talk to Her for me. But like Woody Allen or the Coens, he has consistently worked for so long on the same motifs that coming to him is also a matter of is he particularly inspired that day. I'm pleased to say he is.In the individual pieces of cinematic craft, this is not particularly exceptional. If you're heavily inclined to how story resolves drama, you will see here something that simply trails off near the end. The symbolic motifs greet us upfront; a deer in slow-motion, tumultuous sea out the window. His bright reds on walls and the like are not something I can get excited about, in this or any film. But he is inspired today on the fundamental matter of self passing through self. He manages to do this with just a few strands of narrative. There is the young woman who was on her way to all life ahead of her that night on the train, who finds herself yanked by unexpected passion. There is the house of passion in the small fishing village, eerily explored with Hitchcock hues. And there is bewildering loss as she wanders away a widowed mother.Above all I love here the sense of transition. Almodovar does so well - his actress helps - in spinning narrative to explore tragedy. He says enough about the jittery urge for adventure as a story we throw ourselves in so that we can infer more fleeting illusion around the crushing melodrama about life breaking down. She's not just this grieving woman that another film, say, in the realist format would have simply followed around Madrid; we're privy to all this richness of her young self having set off in search. Things couldn't have only worked this way for her, it's important to see; but sometimes they do, sometimes setting out for open sea means finding yourself marooned on an island, nothing right or wrong.And Almodovar is ineluctably Spanish, meaning Catholic; so communion with the fleeting, transcendent stuff must take place firmly within ritual, in his case (just like Ruiz before) fiction. The whole is narrated by an author writing the story down as she waits in her apartment, shifting us forward and back. It speaks about the imaginative mind being burdened by the narratives of memory. For Almodovar, there is merit in the effort. Had she not stayed behind to write, she would have missed the letter. Even more pertinently for me, there is a bedridden mother (a mirrored woman) who is allowed to languish in her room, written off as an invalid. But when her daughter comes to visit, the recognition nourishes her back to her feet.

Dearest Almodóvar:(I write this open letter out of courtesy in English.) Rocking the world of colors since the early 1980s with full frontal confrontations between the sexes. "Julieta" has become no exemption, yet the wild years with "Matador" (1986) or "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" (1989) seem harder and harder to be of exposure in your recent pictures. Nature as a destructive force as the bull-attack in "Talk To Her" (2002), marking the peak of a director/writer's career, which follows bio-metric cycles as life itself connected with an ocean's tide, calmness bringing shots in "Julieta". The 2016 version of an "Almodóvar Picture" gets between the gap of generations, entangles their emotions, first being a creek to jump over, nowadays a gorge with miles and miles to go around or building an cliff-hanging hard-wire of life-threatening proportions between children and their parents. As usual you keep a tight grip of your cast, which seems to the very last supporting role in care-taking hands. Yet "Julieta" strikes no nerves anymore as "The Skin I Live In" (2011) did with mask-ripping forces; tensions between the characters kept to an minimum, making the picture a pleasant one-time watch of your standard color balance in production design, leaving me wishing for another breakthrough cinematographic action as cameras hitting asphalt in "All About My Mother" (1999).Sincerely Yours,Felix Alexander Dausend

In the first scene Julieta packs in bubble wrap a clay-brown sculpture, which becomes perhaps the film's key symbol. As we later learn, it's a bronze sculpture by Ava, the artist friend of Julieta's first love Xoan. This very modern abstraction of a seated male is marked by three inflections. The penis rampant is abruptly truncated exposing a hole. A Lynn Chadwick-style triangle replaces the head, rendering the human into an abstraction. It emphasizes the rational and impersonal. The terracotta surface makes the figure seem pre-Colombian and light. But despite the clay colour Ava has cast her human figure in bronze to protect it from blowing away. The first of those two details summarize the central romantic relationship. When Julieta first meets and makes love to Xoan he has a comatose wife. When Julieta comes to him the wife has just died, so their new romance flourishes. But the triangle persists. Xoan still has occasional sex with his longtime friend Ava. As Julieta's last lover, Lorenzo, is also Ava's friend she can't escape the triangular relationship. That sculpture adorns the cover of Lorenzo's book. The heavy bronze painted as flesh-like clay encapsulates Almodovar's sense of the human condition here. Clay is the source of the flesh, soft, vulnerable to the elements, especially to the wind. To survive, it needs an additional core of strength and substance. While the metallic is conventionally the emblem of a non-feeling, unemotional character, here the core that enables individuals and relationships to survive is the capacity to love and to remain committed across years of separation and misunderstanding. Thus Xoan maintains an integral commitment to both Ava and Julieta, as her father does to his helpless wife and to the girl hired to care for her. Lorenzo remains in love with Julieta despite her rejection when she decides to stay in Madrid to try to find her daughter Antia, after a 12-year alienation.Julieta's three men form a non-romantic triangle. Xoan and her father form her base: heavy muscular men with beards and a commitment to life in the elements, her fathering choosing to become a farmer and Xoan already a fisherman. In contrast Lorenzo is cerebral, academic, bald, in her maturity a refuge from her earlier men. The train passenger whose suicide haunts Julieta has the academic mien of Lorenzo and the hirsute force of Xoan and her father. The stranger has the other three men's loneliness but having failed to find their loving connection takes the train —with empty luggage — to kill himself. The other men survive their losses because they have the bronze core of love given and received. The suicide is like empty fragile clay.Yet the film escapes any feeling of abstract schema. Xoan dies in wind and water. He storms off to fish when Julieta confronts him with his affair with Ava. That is, one's emotional life may give one the stability and purpose with which to survive. But even it cannot ward off the accidents and cruelties of fate that the flesh is air to. Xoan is broken into pieces by the wind and water but Julieta identifies him by his tattoo with her and their Antia's initials. His death, like his love, brings Julieta and Ava together. They jointly pour Xoan's ashes back into the sea. The film's most enigmatic figure is Antia. We watch her from infancy into maturity but we share Julieta's loss of connection when she goes off to her spiritual retreat. When she learns what drove her father off to the storm she blames her mother and Ava for his death. Then she blames herself for having been enjoying herself at the summer camp when he died. The bronze in this human figure is the oppressive lead of guilt, which all three women have to work to transcend. On this point the clay is the constructive reminder of human vulnerability, helplessness, especially in the twisting fortunes of love. Before Antia turns against her mother she turns against her first best friend Bea. This new friendship keeps Antia at camp and takes her to her friend's home in Madrid, prolonging the period before she learns of her father's death. Antia makes Julieta move to Madrid to be closer to Bea. But Antia's friendship/love eventually grows so oppressive Bea flees her to America. That's when Anita breaks their friendship and goes to the retreat.Despite her anger Antia keeps some connection to her mother, sending a few fanciful birthday cards. For her part, Julieta marks her daughter's birthday by dumping a birthday cake into the trash three years running. Only when she has married, had three children and lost the oldest to drowning does Antia experience what her mother suffered when Xoan died. That loss, that discovery of her own vulnerability, gives Antia the strengthened core to write her mother and provide her own address, tacitly inviting the imminent visit that ends the film.

"Julieta' (2016 release from Spain; 96 min.) brings the story of the title character. As the movie opens, we see Julieta boxing up her books. We learn that Julieta and her boyfriend Lorenzo are planning to move from Madrid to Portugal. Later by happenstance Julieta runs into Bea on the street, a childhood friend of Antia, Julieta's daughter. Julieta is astonished to hear from Bea that Antia has 3 kids now, and we learn that Juleta in fact is completely estranged from Antia. Hearing this news shocks Julieta and she decides to stay in Madrid, and move back into the building where she raised Antia. Julieta starts a long letter to Antia, and in a flashback we go back in time to where it all began for Julieta. At this point we're 10 min. into the movie. What is it that drove Antia apart from Julieta? To tell you more of the plot would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.Couple of comments: this is the latest from writer-director Pedro Almodóvar (the opening credits show it as simply "un film de Almodóvar--never mind that there are two Almodóvars: this Pedro, and his brother Agustin). Pedro has had a lot of ups and downs in his illustrious career, although really more ups than downs (and winning two Oscars along the way). Here he adapts several short stories from Canadian author Alice Munro to bring a complex portrait of a woman struggling mightily with being estranged by her own daughter. The movie plays out in 2 levels: the present (where Julieta is played by Emma Suarz, and the past, where the younger Julia is played by Adriana Ugarte). Almodóvar keeps moving the story forward at a nice clip but never rushes. There are several outstanding scenes. The train sequence near the beginning reminded me of Hitchcock, no kidding. But ultimately this is a movie about guilt (how to create it and how to deal with it) and a sense of doubt. Kudos to the two lead actresses for this multi-layered portrayal."Julieta" opened to great acclaim at last year's Cannes Film Festival, and I couldn't wait to see it. It finally opened this weekend at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati. The Saturday early evening screening where I saw this at was attended okay but not great (maybe 10 people in total). That is a darn shame. If you are in the mood for a quality foreign movie that brings a rich and nuanced portrait about a mother-daughter relationship gone awry, you cannot go wrong with this, be it in the theater, on VOD or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray. "Julieta" is a WINNER.