VOLVER 
PAIN AND GLORY 
PARALLEL MOTHERS 
In Variety's Up Next, we asked four Oscar winners to pick the one person who represents the future of Hollywood.Pedro Almodóvar describes his scripts as making a dish. “They need a lot of cooking time in the oven,” he says. Applying that logic to “Parallel Mothers,” it took about 10 to 12 years. Almodóvar has been writing since he was a child, but his initial goal was to be a novelist. But life had different plans — in the form...
El Deseo
Pedro
Almodóvar
The eccentric and daring Almodóvar scored again new film “Parallel Mothers,” about the relationship between a middle-aged woman (longtime collaborator Penélope Cruz) and an adolescent who meet in a hospital ahead of their simultaneous childbirths. The emotional drama received a nine-minute standing ovation after its premiere at the 2021 Venice Film Festival in September, earning Cruz the Volpi Cup for best actress. It’s a relatively tame effort by the Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker — whose movies are noted for their nudity, sex and off-kilter violence that push the boundaries of the MPA’s R rating — but nevertheless continues a streak of well-received films last maintained by Almodóvar’s 2019 awards contender, “Pain and Glory.”
