Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, the Luis Buñuel of the 1980s, cooks up another perversely funny descent into urban hell in What Have I Done to Deserve This? Carmen Maura plays a middle-class housewife hemmed in by her wildly eccentric relatives. Her principal purpose in life is a balancing act: to keep her head fastened on securely while all others are ...
A Jewish-American woman still reeling from her breakup with her Spanish-Israeli fiancée hits the road with a middle-aged Israeli woman, who is looking to collect the 30,000-dollar debt owed to her by her husband's former business partner, and a Palestinian woman, who claims to know the elusive moneyman's whereabouts, in this road-trip drama from ...
A salesman offers a ride to a sexy woman and soon finds himself deep in trouble in the thriller Lisboa. Joao (Segi Lopez) is a traveling salesman from Portugal who is somewhere outside of Madrid when he stops to offer a lift to Berta (Carmen Maura), an attractive hitch-hiker. Sparks soon fly between them, and moments later they're having sex in a ...
Hector Carre's psychological thriller The Promise concerns a woman who liberates herself from a destructive marriage and becomes nanny to a boy. The boy's family lives in an ornate mansion, but the nanny becomes convinced that the house is haunted, and she goes to frightening lengths to protect the boy. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
Venerable Argentinian filmmaker Alejandro Agresti turns his lens to his own childhood in this nostalgic coming-of-age tale. Set in the director's hometown of Buenos Aires circa 1964, Valentin centers around its title character (and ostensible stand-in for the director), a nine-year-old boy (Rodrigo Noya) whose feuding parents have left him to be ...
Two sisters learn that the bonds of family don't always end after death in this gentle observational comedy drama that marks celebrated Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar's 16th feature. The story explores the interactions between three generations of women in a Spanish family. Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) was born and raised in the apocryphal village ...
Shot in Lisbon, this drama examines the issue of aging as seen from the viewpoints of five women facing middle age -- self-destructive actress-singer Branca (Guesch Patti), losing the respect of her daughter; single literature professor Eva (Miou-Miou), attracted to the son of her friend Barbara (Marthe Keller), who's in the middle of a divorce; ...
In this conventional comedy of manners, two men in the publishing business run into trouble both in the boardroom and in the bedroom. Their venture is starting to run out of black ink, and one of them is very suspicious of his wife's loyalties. Add in a right-wing author of children's stories, a hooker, a secretary driven to her wits' end (not a ...
In Ay, Carmela, filmmaker Carlos Saura again harks back to his bitter childhood memories of the Spanish Civil War. Carmela (Carmen Maura), Paulino (Andres Pajares) and Gustavete (Gabino Diego) are travelling entertainers, trouping through Spain to perform their act before the Republican troops. Early one morning, the three artistes find themselves ...
Maria Garcia (Carmen Maura) is a television journalist and she's about to be a single mother. Her career foremost in her mind, she doesn't slow down even for a minute, despite her pregnancy. She is, however, taking Lamaze classes and is quite competently coping with the romantic attentions of a man she's not very interested in. It's not at all ...
In this romantic French drama, auteur Andre Techine offers an intense, intimate look inside the complex relationship between two emotionally dysfunctional people. Neither Alice (Juliette Binoche) nor Martin (Alexis Loret) seem emotionally healthy enough to sustain a relationship, but somehow they manage to stay together amidst their many personal ...
The fifth feature of noted Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Iglesia, La Comunidad is a frenetic black comedy set in a decrepit old house in the center of Madrid. One of the house's new residents is Julia Garcia (Carmen Maura, whose performance won her a best actress award at the 2000 San Sebastian Film Festival), a real estate agent who has taken an ...
A period piece that blends first love, the power of the cinema and the Mexican Revolution, El Cometa is set in 1910, as Medero's factions were organizing against the Profirio Diaz regime. Romualdo (Gabriel Retes) owns a traveling vaudeville show and has just lost his star attraction when his son Victor (Diego Luna) meets Guy (Patrick LeMauff), a ...
Ana (Carmen Maura) is a veterinarian living in the country with her daughter. She has a comfortable, settled life. From time to time, Dario (Fernando Valverde), one of her co-workers, stops by her farmhouse for a meal, but otherwise her life seems placid and timeless. This all changes when she meets Jose (Joaquim de Almeida), a handsome young man ...
Though the kinky characters and aberrant social behavior common to the works of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar are very evident in his Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the film is at heart a door-slamming farce in the grand tradition. The tiny apartment of pregnant actress Carmen Maura is the "Grand Central Station" setpiece for this ...
In this comedy from Spain, Carmen (Carmen Maura) is a woman in her early 40s who is nearing the end of her rope juggling a career as a reporter, taking care of her two children, minding the house, and dealing with a husband (her third) who thinks that she doesn't pay enough attention to him, and doesn't mind telling her so. The myriad pressures ...
In this Pedro Almodóvar film, a singer at a low-end nightclub hides out at a convent after her lover dies of a bad dose of drugs, and she meets a group of off-the-wall nuns while in hiding. The nuns range from one who writes sensationalist pulp fiction under a pseudonym to another who takes drugs, and another hooked on masochism. But their private ...
A hyperstylized tribute to spaghetti westerns courtesy of fearless Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia, 800 Bullets finds young Carlos (Luis Castro) striking out on his own in search of his long-lost father. Swiping his shrewish businesswoman mother's (Carmen Maura) credit card and setting his sights on Almeria, Carlos begins his quest to learn ...
Sarah (Élodie Bouchez) a young Carmelite nun, collapses in pain, dazed and spouting a nonsense phrase. Concurrently, a great distance away, her identical twin sister, Gaëlle (also Bouchez), in prison, wakes up to find her cell in flames. While Gaëlle, the victim of an attack by her fellow prisoners, is transferred to a different prison, Joachim (G ...
Popular film director Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela) has found a new love in the form of handsome blue-collar Juan (Miguel Molina). Not altogether comfortable with his lifestyle, Juan decides to leave Pablo for a while to contemplate his future. Pablo insists that Juan keep in touch by sending him love letters. Ever the director, he plans to ...
A pair of pink-collar workers short on cash decide to try a new part-time job -- bank robbery -- in this comedy. Lola (Ariana Ozores) and Silvia (Maribel Verdu) are two working-class women who are also best friends. Lola works on the cleaning crew at a bank and sometimes does odd jobs for her friend Maite (Carmen Maura), while Silvia is a ...
Lots of people wish they could be someone else, but a French businessman decides to do something about it in this satirical comedy. Francis Bergeade (Michel Serrault) runs a factory in a small town that makes toilet seats. With his employees on strike and his wife plundering his bank account as she plans their daughter's wedding, Francis's life ...
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