Penélope Cruz

The Bride!

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Jessie Buckley as the Bride

Frankenstein’s unfortunate monster was put together out of offcuts and so is director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, a furiously eclectic assemblage of body parts. Motivating breath, alas, is there none and so the film remains on the table, lifeless, a glorious mess of gorgeous odds and sods, twitching but refusing to draw breath. To summarise the main thrust of the plot, after a century alone Frankenstein’s monster – Frank here – decides he needs a wife, and arrives at the office of Dr Euphronious, renowned for her re-animation research. After some niceties, Frank makes his pitch to Euphronious and she flat-out refuses to build him a bride, on ethical grounds. He responds with … Read more

Ferrari

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Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari

The first obvious thing about Ferrari, a film from 2023, is that it was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, writer of 1969’s The Italian Job. Martin died in 2009! It’s taken a long time to get this film made. Michael Mann has been talking about it since the early years of the new millennium. Back then he was going to produce and Sydney Pollack was going to direct. In the end, after much to and fro, and with Pollack also dead en route, Mann wound up directing it himself. The second thing to say is that for a film about sexy cars, beautiful women, danger, speed, the thrill of the race and so … Read more

L’immensità

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Penélope Cruz as Clara

Preferring to watch movies unprepped, I hadn’t realised when I started watching L’immensità that its director, Emanuele Crialese, was a trans man (ie started life as a woman). What I did know is that I liked the earlier stuff, movies like Nuovomondo and Respiro, which were beautifully crafted stories demonstrating the writer/director’s way with emotionally engaging characters. The world didn’t know Crialese was trans either, by which I mean the media. Crialese “came out” at the Venice Film Festival as a way of explaining his film, which is set in Rome in the 1970s and focuses on a girl on the verge of puberty who really wants to be a boy. Since Crialese … Read more

Parallel Mothers

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Milena Smit and Penélope Cruz

“Transgressive” is a word bandied about a fair bit when it comes to Pedro Almodóvar, but Parellel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) again shows that for him it’s a two-way street. His films are different, unusual, unconventional – yes. And yet in the relationships they portray not that far from the everyday, not that far from what we’re used to, unfrightening. At least since his international breakthrough with 1987’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, it’s been one of his main concerns to show how like the rest of us his exotic hothouse creatures actually are. They love, they laugh, they cry, they’re human. Which is particularly the case with this ripe melodrama … Read more

Volver

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Penelope Cruz in Volver

Pedro Almodóvar is bang back on form in a film celebrating a way of life he’s spent the best part of his artistic life revolting against – family centred, non-cosmopolitan, conservative, Catholic. Well, Generalissimo Franco has been dead a while now.The word Volver means “return” in Spanish, and if Almodóvar is returning to something he long ago rejected – with a fair degree of tenderness (ah, maturity) – Penelope Cruz is also back in a Spanish speaking role, in her home country, in the sort of film she started out in, a drama with its feet in familiar soil but its head who knows where (see Abre los Ojos). It’s set in one … Read more

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

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Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 July Black Tot Day, 1970 Today in 1970 was the last day on which British sailors were issued with a daily rum ration. The ration had initially been beer – much safer than water – and had been set at a gallon (4.5 litres) a day in the 16th century. But that’s a lot of beer if there are a lot of men, and so the ration became a half pint of rum in 1655, after the British had secured whole chunks of the rum-rich West Indies. Drunkenness being a problem, the half-pint ration was mixed with water 1:4 and … Read more