Pain and Glory: Great for Spain and Story…
The newest Pedro Almodóvar movie, Pain and Glory, focuses on an aging and debilitated filmmaker, Salvador Mallo (played by Antonio Banderas) reflecting on his life in his old age.

A close-up look at sand urchins and rock urchins. At the seashore, a man digs up a sand urchin. We look closely. He sets it back in the sand, and it burrows out of sight. Its intestines take nutrients out of sand. Using magnification 200,000 times normal size, we see a rock urchin's spines with suckers on the end; a drawing illustrates how they work. A sea urchin walks toward a rock. We see three-fingered jaws—pedicellaria at the end of flexible stems—take in algae and other bits. We also see cilia less than 0.001 ml in length; their motion constant, creating whirlpools. On the shore again, we watch the setting sun. Occasional titles in French tell us what to watch for.
The newest Pedro Almodóvar movie, Pain and Glory, focuses on an aging and debilitated filmmaker, Salvador Mallo (played by Antonio Banderas) reflecting on his life in his old age.
The film didn’t have to be as long as it is. It just dragged on and on with scenes that had no substance. Every so often we get an action scene, and even those isn’t that fun.
Some people’s first introduction to Mira Nair might be as New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mom. But with her insightful direction of 1991’s Mississippi Masala, Nair shows how much she deserves to be known as an artist. Delivering a nuanced portrait of a romance between a Black man and an Indian woman living in the South, Nair explores the complications each character faces, giving both equal weight.
Initially feeling like a passionate group having a bit of harmless fun with filmmaking, it leads to something sinister enough to leave a mark.
Over the last several years, I have had the privilege of being one of the critics having the opportunity to watch and review several films from writer/director/producer Marcellus Cox, whose efforts are never anything less but grounded, relevant, and steeped in unflinching glimpses illustrating the gripping, inspired, and ever-vacillating realms that make up the human condition.
Two movies that do a fantastic job in conveying the ongoing struggle for racial justice are Selma (2014) and Just Mercy (2019).