Babygirl (2024)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Humiliation. Degradation. Liberation. Erotic thrillers -- hell, even standard award-bait dramas -- rarely traffic in such themes. The rarely grand tradition of erotic thriller is a prurient pleasure of mine, and it's certainly what has made Nicole Kidman my favorite actress over the years. They are almost exclusively hetero-oriented, which perhaps allows me to enjoy them without much by way of personal stakes, but Kidman always lets us in to characters using sex appeal for various (often nefarious) desired outcomes. Crucially, and contrary to most actors who get typecast or even choose to make so many films in a single subgenre, Kidman's characters are always vastly different. And few have been more honest and surprisingly accessible than Romy Mathis.

Romy, the wealthy CEO of a tech company in New York City, is on top of the world. And she's no Miranda Priestly about it; one of the early scenes shows her warmly welcoming a group of interns into her private office to personally answer questions about the company on their first day. She's not a workaholic, though she does answer her phone (that is inexplicably never on silent mode) more than a healthy person should, and in fact is apparently a loving, affectionate, and intentionally present family woman, caring deeply for her theatre director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas, who is really wonderful in a truncated role) and their two teenage daughters. The astute observer will tell you that Romy's company specializes in robots for warehouses, removing human laborers, and Jacob's current production is Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, about a woman in an unhappy marriage, so really we should know that there is going to be trouble even if we haven't seen the film's marketing.

But the film provides ample context. Its opening scene shows us specifically that their sex life is not one of egalitarian pleasure. Romy dutifully and energetically has sex with her husband, but shortly afterward she sneaks away to finish herself off in secret while watching porn. Specifically, it's porn that includes an offscreen man dominantly telling a woman what to do. It really seems to work for Romy, who psychology might tell us is tired or bored of being in charge all the time. If not Ibsen, Chekhov would certainly tell us that her secret carnal desires will be her undoing, as well as her family's, so we'd better strap in for the tragic ride.

And this is why Halina Reijn's direction and writing is so brilliant in this film. She wastes no time getting to the meat of it, sidestepping the dated tropes of visualizing Romy's perfect life, perfect marriage, perfect kids, perfect house, and perfect job; those are given. Instead, we dive directly into the heat of an enseamed bed, as a notable Danish prince might say, wherein lies the real domestic danger to people with power. Reijn is interested in something far more insightful and real than the destruction of a rich white woman's family due to her voracious, taboo sexuality.

Enter Samuel, played by a mindful and demure Harris Dickinson (Beach Rats, Trust, Where the Crawdads Sing, The Iron Claw, See How They Run). His effortless suavity and confidence oozes from his clenched jaw and slumped shoulders, and Dickinson's unlikely performance only begins there. His unkempt visage and drab habiliments belie calm, firm mannerisms of someone who knows exactly who he is. Under his baggy, likely secondhand clothes and miserably cheap haircut hide piercing eyes, sensuous lips, and a thin, capable body wholly sure of itself. On his first day as an intern in the company, Samuel successfully commands a violent, off-leash dog on the street (which Romy sees and can never quite shake). He brazenly challenges Romy in her own office in front of several impressionable newbies. He declares his intentions for her to be his mentor despite her not being an option. He is the kind of man she's almost never around, someone who sees her as a human on the same level as himself, for whom professional attire and wealthy status and fancy titles mean nothing next to the raw intimate dynamic between two human bodies attracted to each other. He is the kind of man she wants. He is the kind of man she fantasizes about. He is absolutely not a man she can have.

And yet she almost unconsciously finds herself magnetically pulled to him. During their initial mentorship meeting, Samuel quite readily observes that she seems to want to be told what to do. It's a horrifying and deeply erotic moment, one that reveals everything we need to know about these two characters. We've all met someone who not only reads us like a book but speaks that which we cannot ourselves admit. It feels like love, and it is decidedly not love. But Romy chooses to lean in, despite her repeated verbal protestations. Kidman's brilliance is on full display here, as she attempts to disguise her arousal and interest as being shocked and insulted, unwilling to say "no" but unable to say "yes." He's an intern, and as such, the least likely person to perceive her in this way; she has no ready defense for it. Meanwhile, Dickinson isn't being manipulative or predatory; he's shooting straight and calling it like he sees it. Later in the film, he'll describe their affair as if they were children, stopping himself before detailing their trial-and-error adventures in sexuality's darker regions. He's no Christian Grey. This isn't Secretary. If anything, it's more like Little Children.

Romy becomes addicted to their sexual affair, tethering herself to him via cell phone while starting to lose touch with her family and her work. We gather that this kind of sex -- not the sneaking around part, but rather the explicitly consensual and also experimental, kinky parts -- is like nothing she's ever experienced with another man. Samuel literally has to explain consent to her, and one of the most shocking parts of the film is that he's completely right. He is not, in any way, a predator.

Well, "not any way" might be a bit far. After all, it takes two to tango, and he's just as communicative via phone as she is. Perhaps more so, as their explicit dynamic is one in which Samuel dominates and Romy submits. While the marketing of this film will surely interest the masses who think Fifty Shades of Grey is hot (and I'm here to tell you: it's not, and it's not healthy), I'm hopeful that people take Babygirl for what it is and not what they crudely hope it might be. Sex in American cinema has been in a bit of a dry spell for a while now, which I actually appreciate, because I hope it means we've worn out the bad sex and started developing an interest in good sex. This might be unlikely, given the boom in popularity of almost exclusively awful smut in written literature, but this film makes the case for good eroticism on screen. Samuel definitely goes after what he wants, and it doesn't stop him from crossing personal boundaries -- one scene, when he materializes at Romy's house and socializes with her family, is one of the film's most disturbing despite its remarkably tame outcome -- but he's no Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction. 

More importantly, Reijn never lets the film be about sex for the sake of sex. It's never as explicit as I expected it to be, and never crosses any new thresholds of what we've seen before. If anything, its explicit thrills are contained to the close-ups of Kidman and Dickinson as they stare into each other's eyes while playing psychological power games. Dickinson often laughs during their encounters because it's new and weird for him too; Kidman often lurches from angrily indignant to coyly sassy to ecstatically relieved because her character has no mature way to handle the nervous onslaught of her sensations. Samuel treats sex, even with an older married woman, as a fact of life and an opportunity for heightened experience (not for human connection, which is a fascinating character trait). Romy treats sex as an obsessive compulsion to be entertained and controlled before it derails her, which she knows in paradoxical tension it will almost certainly do.

The acting will receive accolades as well as most popular and critical attention. And it is more than worthy. But Reijn's writing and direction deserve just as much, if not more. Romy's residual trauma is implied and never explained, just as Samuel's life is largely left mysterious. There are no frank discussions of what we might call hot topics like sadomasochism, cheating, or even polyamory, and though those elements are clearly present and meant to spur post-screening discussions, they aren't even explicitly depicted in any articulate way. I don't list these observations as the film's failings but as its victories in presenting itself on its own terms without pandering to sound bytes and buzzwords. Reijn trusts us to know what is going on and what to think about it without sharply defining anything for us to easily swallow and regurgitate later. And she even has fun with it, including pointed needle drops with "Never Tear Us Apart" (again, demonstrating that Fifty Shades just got it all wrong) and a laughably sudden but eventually moving moment underscored by George Michael's "Father Figure." If you had told me I'd ever find that song hot, I'd have laughed at you. But Reijn knowingly and playfully engages with us on these metatextual levels while encouraging us to feel all the weird, uncomfortable, and deeply troubling things humans do, can, and should experience in this weird world of bodies and feelings. But mostly bodies.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Score: 3.5 / 5

We begin this adventure with a flashback to 1944 -- which, if you are anal about these things too, occurs about six years after The Last Crusade -- as Indiana and his colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) attempt to loot a Nazi train loaded with art and artifacts. They're looking for the Lance of Longinus, the "holy spear" that supposedly pierced the side of Christ during his crucifixion, which turns out to be a fake. The Nazis capture them, but it doesn't take too long for them to grab another great bit of mystery history: half of Archimedes' Dial, an "Antikythera" orrery meant to locate fissures in time and possibly allow for time travel. They escape with this half of the Dial before the train is derailed by the Allies.

Launching forward in time, the movie proper begins in 1969 (about twelve years after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), as Dr. Jones is preparing to retire from Hunter College. Harrison Ford breathes new vibrancy into this character, who is about a decade younger than the actor himself, not through any remarkable physical work but rather through his experience of age. We got whiffs of it in the previous film, but here Mangold works with Ford to showcase Indiana's world-weariness, yes, but not in a hard-boiled way. He's still smart as a whip, fiery and impassioned, and willing to just do rather than hem and haw about things. It's not the existential agony of aging Mangold handled so hauntingly in Logan from both Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman; this is poignant and resonant fulfillment (and some dissatisfaction) found at the end of a long and distinguished career, and it's fleshed out effectively over the course of this film. Unfortunately, Ford is aggressively de-aged here (which doesn't bother me as much as some who simply cannot abide the uncanny valley phenomenon); I say "unfortunately" because, physical appearance aside, it's jarring to hear Ford's gravelly, real-life voice of today coming from himself looking rather like he looked forty years ago.

Indiana's motives have never been particularly clear to me in this franchise, beyond a vague sense of historical responsibility and anti-fascism, but for the first time, I really understood what drives him in this film: he is, at heart, an academic, and so when the thought of time travel begins to gestate for him, his eyes spark to life at the prospect of ending his life in some of the history to which he's devoted his career. Why should this matter to him? Well, he's lonely and depressed. This film brusquely changes direction from the end of Crystal Skull by mentioning that Indiana's son Mutt (who was played by Shia LaBeouf) died in Vietnam and that Marion (Karen Allen) has left her depressed husband and filed for legal separation. It's a crude but workable way to cut out Mutt -- who everyone hated, and I will never understand why -- and of course Marion herself, who is probably still as capable of helping the action as Indiana. I'd have liked this story to include both those characters more, because Crystal Skull is unfairly maligned by audiences for completely mysterious reasons to me (I love it and have never heard any rational arguments against it beyond unspecific personal taste preferences... and of course the fridge scene), and I'd like to see how an aging Indiana Jones handles suddenly having an adult family.

But what about the plot? Without his family, who will Indy team up with? Never fear, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is here, playing Helena Shaw, the now-adult daughter of Basil Shaw from the prologue. Helena reveals that she is Indiana's goddaughter and that her father died after years obsessing over the Dial. She herself wants to pick up his research, and so Indiana reluctantly gives her his half of the Dial. Then enters the villain: Mads Mikkelsen plays a Nazi astrophysicist named Jurgen Voller. He is also de-aged in the opening flashback; Mikkelsen will always be the best casting choice for a villain from vaguely eastern Europe. Voller, who is after both pieces of the Dial, was working with Hitler during the war but now has his own aims, something that he announces in the film's dramatic lurch to its climax and which I won't spoil here. He attacks the school, murdering some faculty and framing Indiana, who takes to horseback in a spectacular chase sequence through a moon landing parade, an antiwar protest march, and the NYC subway.

Helena, meanwhile, is revealed to be an antiquities smuggler, seeking historical artifacts to sell on the black market to buttress her gambling debts. That, for me, was perhaps the single biggest disappointment in this film, because it's a contrived gimmick meant to spark action and comedy rather than reveal any characterization or offer storytelling originality. Her greedy opportunism allows the film, soon enough, to hop over to Tangier, where she's trying to sell and ends up collecting another sidekick in Teddy (Ethann Isidore). From here, it's a regular Indiana Jones adventure, with his ragtag team trying to thwart the pursuing fascists even as they lead them to the treasure.

But this is not a Steven Spielberg film, and it's also not particularly adept with its action sequences. Mangold is a wonderful director, but I can't help but wish Spielberg had agreed to direct the final Indiana Jones movie. There is some connective tissue -- call it artistic integrity -- missing between Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny; most people felt that between the third and fourth film, but not me. I feel it now. The editing is clunky and the action choreography is often awkward and incoherent; the fault could be on multiple heads, but this is a far cry from the thrilling precision of similar sequences in major recent action sequels like John Wick and Mission: Impossible.

Think I'm being harsh? Look at two sequences and tell me otherwise. First, the car chase through Tangier is an absolute mess, when it could (seemingly easily) be both visually satisfying and logically sound. Secondly, and more damningly to my mind, there's a scene in which Indy and Helena travel to the Aegean to ask an old friend to help them dive to an old shipwreck that might contain the other half of the Dial. The setup is frustrating enough, dramatically (looking snidely at the screenplay by committee that needed more workshopping), because the old friend is Antonio Banderas, getting top billing for roughly three scenes of work, who seems to be pretty gay with his hunky shipmates. After almost no time, they're all jumping into the deeps and Indy finds himself in a sunken ship surrounded by eels. It's a fabulous concept, of course, and scratches the "icky creature" scene in each movie of this franchise; Indy is taunted at one point that eels are like underwater snakes, which he fearfully and indignantly rejects the thought of. But the scene itself is so poorly composed that it's difficult to see and even harder to remember; terrible lighting, miserable cinematography, an over-reliance on CG action, little cause or reason, and a bizarre deus ex machina make what could have been a brilliant and terrifying scene a good time for a bathroom break.

And then there's the film's ending sequence, which I desperately wish to have had more of. So rarely in these films do we see the full effect of whatever magical item Indiana has rescued or restored: sure, the Ark lets out some ghosts that melt people, the Stones bring fertility to the village, the Grail saves Henry Jones from his nearly fatal gunshot, and the replaced Skull allows the aliens to reactivate their ship and leave Earth. It's usually a fast scene with little grounding in reality, lots of magic and mystery, and then we're done, so when this movie started hinting at time travel, I expected the same. I was so wrong. I don't want to spoil the ending, but they do indeed travel to another time -- one wholly unexpected and endlessly satisfying for both plot purposes as well as an insight into Archimedes himself -- and we hang out there for a while. It's a great sequence, one that allows Ford the chance to let Indiana be truly in awe of his life's work and the experience of being present in history. A climax to a series that reveals more about the main character than we've ever seen? Yes, please! I just wish we had had more time with that, or that it could have been more foregrounded in the two hours that led to this sequence, because it kind of comes out of nowhere, floors us, and then the movie ends.

I hope that, while this is the last Indiana Jones film, Harrison Ford isn't done making movies. His dramatic work here is the best he's given in a few years, and I'd love to see him lean into dramatically heavy roles for older men, maybe showcasing his real skills and remarkable humor in ways we haven't seen much from him since the '80s. I also hope this film doesn't fall prey to the polarized and polarizing critical commentary of our social media, because it won't survive that. Dial of Destiny is a multilayered puzzle box meant to satisfy young audiences as well as old fans of the series, to bridge the gaps between loved and unloved entries, and to ultimately try to end an iconic franchise. It's not going to win everyone, but I hope people don't mindlessly junk it along with Crystal Skull; even as a fan of that film, this new one made me want to rewatch it and enjoy it afresh. A final thought: Dial of Destiny is about two similar men (again, a familiar trope in this series between Indy and his villains), one who wants to control history, the other who, by appreciating history too much, has become inert and stuck in history with regret. There's a lot going on here, more than an Indiana Jones has the right to offer; I just wish it had been a little more. Or wasn't the end. Or both.

Uncharted (2022)

 Score: 2.5 / 5

Anchors aweigh! It feels like ages since we got a swashbuckling adventure movie, and Uncharted delivers on its promise in just about every way. I'm not familiar with the video game series source material, but by some accounts those games are among the most popular and esteemed of Sony's catalog. This movie doesn't always feel like it was adapted from games -- there tends to be a similar aesthetic -- but when it does, it does. We go from occasionally heartfelt drama to galleons flying through the air, so you have to suspend a lot of expectation for realism, but this movie reminded me more closely of National Treasure with a dash of Indiana Jones thrown in. Not terribly smart, but a lot of fun, and we get some eye candy along the way.

Directed by Ruben Fleischer (Venom, Gangster Squad), the film opens with a bang: Tom Holland -- looking not unlike Brendan Fraser in The Mummy -- clinging to supply boxes dangling out of a cargo plane. We're suddenly shifted to Holland as a young boy, and we learn his character is Nate Drake, as he attempts to steal an artifact from a museum with his older brother. Once caught, his brother is kicked out and promises to return to Nate. Apparently that doesn't happen, as we jump ahead fifteen years to Nate bartending and pickpocketing his patrons. It's an odd casting choice; obviously Holland is eminently bankable, but his boyish good looks and higher voice don't quite match the ruff and rugged vibe of the Drake character. He tries, bless him, by wearing leather and bulking up a lot from his Spider-man look, but he can't quite shake the impression that he is playing dress-up as an adventure hero. His sleight of hand is more in line with Oliver Twist than his badassery is with Lara Croft. 

At his bar, he's approached by Mark Wahlberg -- frankly, looking and acting exactly as I expect Holland will one day -- and the story proper gets underway. Wahlberg's character Sully recently was exploring with Nate's brother and together they stole an old diary promising to lead them to an ancient treasure from Magellan's historic voyage. Globetrotting and stealing are both easy enough for these two (surprising if they're merely thieves), though they have a rocky start when it comes to trusting each other. Once they cross paths with Chloe (beautiful and talented Sophia Ali), an old teammate of Sully's, things really get going quickly, and I lost track of the plot's intricacies. Or perhaps I should say complexities, because there's very little that's intricate in this film.

It's a muscly, rollicking adventure from start to finish, and it works hard to overcome the typical video-game-adaptation problem of not having enough heart. There are many "emotional" scenes in this film that seem catered to Holland's penchant for teary-eyed stares, and for the most part they help disguise the feeling of action obsession. But between some truly outrageous set pieces -- when we get to the completely bonkers cargo plane episode, the auditorium was bubbling with audible laughter rather than gasps or cheers -- and a lackluster villain, this movie reveals that there's just not much substance to be enjoyed. I mean, Antonio Banderas is the villain, and it feels like he's in about three scenes before he's suddenly and bloodlessly dispatched. I couldn't help but feel his part was probably truncated by at least half. Then again, his main minion (Tati Gabrielle) is never less than entrancing to watch.

It's also decidedly safe in terms of content for a PG-13 movie. Not just in terms of sex or violence, although precious little of either is present here, but even in terms of plot, character, and humor. There are so few earned laughs in this movie that I think most of it was played earnestly; for something so laughable, it should be riotously funny. But it's rarely humorous, and rarely very serious, which makes the flavor of the whole film -- felt most strongly in its meandering middle section -- tepid and vague. There's also precious little that grounds the film in reality visually, as so much relies on digital effects and green screens that it occasionally felt like we were actually watching a video game on a huge screen. Perhaps some more world building, character development, or even a simpler and more fleshy plot would have done the trick. Perhaps playing the game is a better investment. I'll leave that for others to determine, but I had an entertainingly diverting two hours with this picture.

The Laundromat (2019)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Scott Z. Burns has been a busy man, with the release of both The Report and The Laundromat on streaming services in 2019. The former I found to be one of my favorite movies of last year, and while the latter didn't, it is still a worthy and worthwhile flick. It can be as occasionally difficult to follow -- or swallow -- but it still shows Burns doing his uniquely brilliant work: making a movie out of a situation that is surely unfilmable, or at least uncinematic by definition. He's done this before, but this time, he turns his piercing eye and dry wit toward corporate malfeasance in the financial world, using the release of the Panama Papers as his thematic crucible. Here, he pairs again with Steven Soderbergh in a film that appears to be a cutesy "DIY money laundering" special until you realize the bad guys are having the last laugh, and the film transforms into an angry, anti-capitalist call for action.

We begin with Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas in character as Mossack and Fonseca, respectively, the lawyers and founders of the legal firm named after them. If you're like me and knew nothing about this firm, don't worry: it's pretty obvious these are the Bad Guys and that they're up to no good. At least, not for anyone but themselves. These are those one-percenters who develop impossibly complex financial systems to help billionaires stay rich and avoid paying taxes to their governments. Their posh, egotistical delivery is pointedly nihilistic, which makes you as skeptical as interested. We get the feeling that, although they are attempting to skirt the laws, these are the wealthy for whom loopholes allow them to make (and break) their own rules. Don't ask me specifics, though; as much as this movie tries to make these difficult topics accessible, I found myself bewildered by the halfway point.

It's not unlike Adam McKay's approach to the housing crisis in The Big Short, making a jargon-heavy and nuanced profession somewhat understandable and thoroughly entertaining, even if it's all moving a little too quickly for someone like me to understand. I probably should have taken a business or finance class in college, but here we are and I hate numbers. Thankfully, Burns has his characters break the fourth wall a lot to tell us more or less what's happening, and Soderbergh heightens the superficiality of these scenes to make it all a sort of meta-commentary on how we consume difficult information we really don't understand. That is, if it's in shiny packaging, delivered by classy A-listers, and makes us chuckle a bit, we'll swallow it, hook, line, and sinker. Oldman and Banderas are walking though theatrical sets in tuxes drinking martinis as they dryly "teach" us about finances. It's a filmmaking tactic that, in this case, puts us squarely in the position of its characters -- specifically, the ones who have no idea what's happening to them.

Speaking of which: Mossack and Fonseca narrate three stories about some of the people affected by the corrupt practices of their own firm. The first concerns Ellen Martin (Meryl Streep), whose husband (James Cromwell) dies in an accident. When she tries to get compensation from the boating company, she embarks on a journey through insane legalese to a reinsurance group, a remote trust, and a shell company based on a tiny Caribbean island. Before she is able to properly confront the trust manager (Jeffrey Wright), he is arrested by the IRS. The second story is of young Simone, whose father (Nonso Anozie) bribes her with $20 million in shares in an investment company to keep quiet about his affair with her best friend; when she goes to claim the money, it is revealed they are worthless shares in a shell company. The third story concerns the murder of Maywood (Matthias Schoenaerts) -- apparently based on a real person -- who demanded money from a rich Chinese client to continue laundering money through an offshore account and shell company.

Fascinating as the frame narration is -- and, really, it's a genius piece of work in itself -- it's not my favorite part of the film. I found the various stories more engaging, and for a brief time I wondered if this would become an ensemble drama like Crash with interconnected moments. Thankfully, it does not, but the film tends to have trouble straddling its focal points while balancing a unique dark humor. My favorite parts include Streep doing what she does best at this age: playing an innocent and furious woman, someone righteously crusading against a monstrous injustice she will never be able to comprehend, much less defeat. She is an everywoman, until she's not, and the film shows her doing her frighteningly acute character actor business as well. Really, I think it's amazing she has never worked with Soderbergh or Burns before, because they all can perform this uncanny balance of dramatic styles so well. But this is not a subtle movie, and some of the messages are as loud and crass as the filmmakers could deliver them; they call out the sins of the wealthy as well as the country in which greed is in fact (and law) enshrined as a virtue.

The Burns and Soderbergh team here crafts what may be the quirkiest, most stylistically camp outing from either, and it works brilliantly. I think. I couldn't quite shake the feeling that I was always a few steps behind the narration, and miles behind conceptually grasping the realities of money laundering and financial corruption rampant in our country and around the world. The film's ending, easily the best scene, is a galvanizing cry for finance reform: the brief imprisonments of Mossack and Fonseca are darkly farcical, and then Meryl Streep takes the stage in a magnificent relay through the multiple characters she has played in this movie, reciting the Panama Paper whistleblower's "John Doe" manifesto, ending in character as herself, the actress, but posing as Lady Liberty. It's a chilling and brilliant move from actress, writer, cinematographer, and director. It's just too bad I still didn't really know what anybody was talking about in this movie.

Pain and Glory (2019)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I'm not sure how many other films have so insightfully and compassionately championed art as a profession best achieved and maintained through personal pain. There's something incredibly powerful in seeing it in the realm of filmmaking through the medium of cinema, as we are effectively placed into the metafictional and reflexive nature of the art. We're subjected to a specific vision -- in this case, of an aging director still dealing with his lifelong pains -- of the world, and shown the ways in which his life and his art intertwine. And it features Antonio Banderas in his best role and performance in years.

Banderas, continuing his lengthy history of collaborations with writer-director Pedro Almodovar,  plays Salvador Mallo, a stand-in for Almodovar himself whose name contains all the letters of the real-life artist's mononym. The movie takes place later in the fictional director's career, and the inciting incident here is Mallo meeting with his former star, with whom he has some bad blood. Mallo thinks poorly of his star Alberto Crespo (and once-friend, seemingly) for his performance, which Mallo views as being negatively influenced by Crespo's heroin usage. But in order to deal with his own chronic pain and emotional/intellectual/professional uncertainty, Mallo decides to try heroin himself. It's the sort of consciously dangerous and irresponsible but hopefully fruitful sin that will allow him to create again. Or he will succumb. But this isn't a story about the dangers of artists using drugs, or of addicts unable to separate art from reality. If there is a difference.

Instead, it's a beautiful meditation on how art works in a life devoted to it. Though the film is structured in strict measure and sometimes feels a little forced, its deliberate moves are accessible and fairly easy to follow. Most notable in flashbacks that depict scenes from Mallo's childhood that include his mother (Penelope Cruz) and Eduardo, a young worker whom Mallo teaches to read and write and who probably sparked a sexual awakening in Mallo. These scenes are, in the end, revealed to be scenes from Mallo's newest film, one that embraces potentially painful memories and relishes in the art of personal experience. This isn't some Terrence Malick impressionistic arthouse experiment in biography that forces the audience to wonder if there are connections between scenes we see. It's a calculated, heartfelt, but stone-cold sober journey to artistic enlightenment with no small dose of heartfelt autobiography along the way.

Yet Almodovar and Banderas together stop the film from feeling overly sentimental or maudlin. Banderas is not doing an impression of his director. Mallo might be one of the most grounded, fully realized characters of an Almodovar feature: complex and utterly, impossibly believable. Despite the somewhat episodic narrative, the film's exuberant use of color and set decoration breathe a living, dynamic theatricality to the proceedings. And when, in the film's emotional climax, Mallo's past lover returns and we see that the seeds of drug dependency were planted in their relationship, things finally coalesce into an emotional toll. A question is raised as to whether the pain of troubled relationships ruined Mallo's art; Mallo's dismissive response reveals that without these pains, he would have never reached his own glory.