PICK OF THE WEEK
Bitter Christmas (selected cinemas)
The year is 2004 and Elsa (Bárbara Lennie, superb) is a struggling arthouse filmmaker, making a living by shooting ads in Madrid. Poleaxed by a migraine, she is taken to the emergency room by her amiable boyfriend Bonifacio known as Beau (Patrick Criado), a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper.
They met when she was scouting a hen party for a model to appear in an underwear ad, and, a year on, Elsa is still mesmerised by his physical appearance; reflecting as he sleeps that he is a “beautiful animal”.
In those two brutal words we first encounter the coldness that underpins the often-fiery emotion in Pedro Almodóvar’s 24th feature; which, in its autobiographical exploration of the role of the artist, is a natural companion piece to the masterly Pain and Glory (2019).
Cut to 2026, and acclaimed director Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is emerging, albeit fitfully, from a long bout of writer’s block in the chic villa where he lives with his younger boyfriend, Santi (Quim Gutiérrez). Elsa is, in fact, a character in his new script, a marionette twitching on the end of his strings – and, desperate for a comeback, he will do anything to make her story more vivid.
Meanwhile, his best friend and longtime assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) is quitting her job to tend to her friend Elena, who is in the throes of a personal tragedy. Without compunction, Raúl quarries Mónica’s private life to develop his draft: Elsa invites her (notionally fictional) friend, Natalia (Milena Smit), suicidal after the death of her son, to stay with her in Lanzarote. As so often in the work of the 76-year-old Spanish auteur, we are plunged into a Pirandellian game.
Though cinematographer Pau Esteve Birba makes full use of the paintbox palette that is one of Almodóvar’s trademarks, the scene in which Elsa and Natalia explore the island’s bleak volcanic sands and the zocos that protect the vines from harsh winds is one of the most striking in the movie; suggestive of the moral limbo through which all the characters wander in these nesting-doll narratives.
It is not that Raúl is oblivious to the exploitative nature of his art. In his screenplay, Elsa’s friend Patricia (Victoria Luengo) denounces her magnificently for borrowing details of her marital problems; having – in an earlier scene – bared her soul and played her La Llorona, a heart-wrenching song performed by Mexican singer Chavela Vargas (1919-2012), who was one of Almodóvar’s closest friends and most important muses (the movie itself takes its title from Amarga Navidad, another classic Chavela canción ranchera).
The point – the whole point – is that, in the end, Raúl knows full well that his writing is vampiric, but does not care. “My life is meaningless if I’m not filming,” he says, and means it. When Mónica confronts him in fury, he refuses to repent, much less atone.
“Autofiction!” he roars, as if that acquits him of everything. Graham Greene famously said that there is “a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer”. Almodóvar’s bracingly honest message in this fine, witty and complex film is that, if necessary, the true artist may need something closer to an ice floe.
Suggested Reading
Female serial killer thriller Furious is prestige TV at its best
FILM
The Dog Stars (general release)
Sir Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Peter Heller’s 2012 post-apocalyptic thriller is his best and most entertaining movie since The Martian (2015). In 2035, after a flu pandemic has wiped out most of the global population, mechanic Hig (Jacob Elordi) and former US Marine Bangley (Josh Brolin) have their own fortified compound in Erie, Colorado.
Accompanied by his beloved Belgian Malinois Jasper, Hig makes regular flights to Denver in a battered Cessna to scavenge supplies, while Bangley stands guard in a sniper’s crow’s nest, taking out all intruders (“Shoot first and inquire afterwards”). As a hardcore Hobbesian, he tells his fellow survivor that their new life, nasty, brutish and possibly short, is simply a return to humanity’s default position: “It’s the way people have always been. It’s just pulling the mask of civilisation off for you to see.”
Paradoxically, Hig’s profound grief at the loss of his wife makes him determined not to surrender to this desolate world view. He drops in on a Mennonite community led by Aaron (Benedict Wong), bringing them cartons of Sprite and helping them with odd jobs. When his dog is killed by marauding “Reapers”, he decides – against Bangley’s stern counsel – to take his chances and fly off in search of something better.
The plan fails almost immediately when his plane crash-lands near a ranch where the instantly hostile Pops (Guy Pearce) lives with his daughter Cima (Margaret Qualley), a former doctor who is soon drawn to Hig.
In the completely loco third act, the trio heads for the city of Grand Junction, where they encounter the deranged Darlene (Allison Janney), leading a Christian militia cult but still dressed as an air stewardess. Production designer Chris Seagers excels himself in these scenes where the sect’s surreal base resembles the ballroom at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980) as reimagined by John Waters.
Brolin is the standout in a uniformly strong cast, cementing his status as the defining face of dystopian Americana – a reputation building since No Country for Old Men (2007) and the two Sicario movies (2015 and 2018). And credit to Scott, who at 88 (more than eight years older than Donald Trump) is still working at a furious clip, already planning a new version of Treasure Island starring Hugh Jackman. If you can, see The Dog Stars in IMAX.
FILM
The Peter Sellers Centenary Collection (STUDIOCANAL Vintage Classics)
As a cultural prepper – which is to say that, as much as I love streaming platforms, I don’t trust them an inch as long-term cinematic archives – I regard a beautifully curated eight-disc Blu-ray box set like this as cause for celebration.
So enjoy these sumptuous 4K restorations of first-rate Peter Sellers movies: among the eight selected features, there are classics such as Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955), challenged only by Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) as the greatest Ealing comedy; and John and Roy Boulting’s I’m All Right Jack (1959) in which Sellers is formidable as communist shop steward Fred Kite.
But there are also neglected or forgotten treasures like Basil Dearden’s The Smallest Show on Earth (1957); Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1959), in which Sellers plays prime minister Amphibulos of the Pacific island of Gaillardia, who has a wonderful line in malapropisms (“the bull in the Chinese shop”); and (one of my favourites) Heavens Above! (1963) – the Boultings again – in which he is the idealistic priest John Smallwood, appointed to a parish that doesn’t have “enough real Christians about to feed one decent lion.”
The box set also includes a lavish guide to the movies – which you really don’t get with Netflix.
BOOKS
Republic of letters…
As the US mid-terms draw near, here are two very different new books to get you in the mood. First up: in the 40 years since his death, the right-wing lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who helped to ensure that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage in 1953, was Joe McCarthy’s chief anti-communist inquisitor, and later established a lucrative legal practice in Manhattan, has become a fixture in the American cultural imagination.
Witness Tony Kushner’s epic two-part play Angels in America (1991-2); the “Blue-Haired Lawyer” in The Simpsons; Matt Tyrnauer’s terrific 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?; and, most recently, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024), which earned Jeremy Strong an Oscar nomination for his menacing portrayal of Cohn as mentor to the young Trump.
What has been conspicuously lacking is a definitive modern biography. So who better to set that straight than Kai Bird, whose American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), co-written with Martin J. Sherwin, won a Pulitzer Prize and inspired Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster hit?
Bird’s American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump (Simon & Schuster, September 1), co-authored with his wife Susan Goldmark, is a riveting, authoritative and page-turning account of a public figure as consequential as he was wicked: a closeted gay man who was viciously homophobic; a Jew who routinely denounced other Jews as communists; an attorney who respected power and narrative triumph rather than the law.
Trump spoke to the writers on his personal cell phone on several occasions, and American Scoundrel, intrinsically fascinating because of its subject, also establishes beyond doubt the indispensable role that Cohn played in the formation and rise of the 45th and 47th president.
Emilee Hackney’s All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir (Penguin Press eBook), already a New York Times bestseller, has been unfairly if inevitably compared with JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016): the book that launched the young venture capitalist on the path that would lead him, in only eight years, to the vice-presidency.
But Hackney’s account of her upbringing in Tazewell County, in rural southwest Virginia, and her conflicted relationship in adulthood with the place of her birth, is better written, more nuanced and marked by a quite exceptional lyrical honesty. The book is also essential reading on the resilient power of religion in American life – in this case, all-consuming Pentecostalism.
Though the author makes it to Harvard and is now a university administrator, this is very far from a by-the-numbers tale of American social mobility. Hackney’s story is punctuated by terrible traumas, periods of lonely dislocation and the sense that she is treated both as an impostor on campus and an exile in Virginia: the knotty reality of the “politics of place”.
It is in the writing workshop of Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind (2018) and the splendid A World Appears (2026), that she is first able to speak “about my Appalachian background without the shame I was supposed to feel”. A remarkable debut.
Most popular
The uncomfortable truth about Ariana Grande
A certain lack of Self-awareness
Why can’t Britain be a bit more Mark Carney?
Face it: Trump’s going mad
