Pain and Glory

Ailing and adrift, a celebrated film director looks back at his work and life in Almodóvar’s pensive, tantalizingly self-reflexive drama, which garnered Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and for Antonio Banderas's extraordinary lead performance. As he prepares for a thirtieth-anniversary revival of one of his early movies, Salvador (Banderas) rekindles a complicated connection with that film’s leading man (Asier Etxeandia) and revisits indelible moments from his past, especially his relationship with his mother, vividly played in her younger years by Penélope Cruz and as an older woman by Julieta Serrano. “A story of memory and creation, youth and its loss, Pain and Glory circles around the idea of art as self-creation” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times).