Pain and Glory

Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) won Antonio Banderas the Best Actor prize at Cannes 2019 (Banderas's first major Cannes prize after a substantial sustained career) alongside the Goya for Best Film and Best Actor. The film consolidated Almodóvar's late-career period of more autobiographical-reflective work after the broader-tonal experimentation of his earlier career, and was widely received as one of his most-loved recent productions.

Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas, in his career-defining late-career role) is a celebrated Spanish film director in his sixties, beset by accumulating physical ailments and a long creative block. The film follows him across what is broadly several months, visits to a former cinematographer collaborator, an unexpected reunion with a former actor (Asier Etxeandia) on a film he made decades earlier, and a sustained interior register of memory: his impoverished childhood beside his mother (Penélope Cruz, in supporting flashback capacity), a consequential figure from his earlier emotional life (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the small accumulating moments that have shaped him.

The film operates simultaneously as semi-autobiographical Almodóvar character study, sustained meditation on creative-life identity, and quiet engagement with the themes of physical decline that the director's continuing later work has been more extensively engaging with. José Luis Alcaine's photography of contemporary Madrid and the flashback Andalusian-village exteriors anchors a film widely cited among Almodóvar's late-career masterworks.