Parallel Mothers (2021)

FULL SPOILER-FREE REVIEW @ https://www.msbreviews.com/movie-reviews/parallel-mothers-spoiler-free-review "Parallel Mothers holds an unexpectedly shocking narrative about motherhood, featuring two remarkable performances from Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit. Despite some dull soap-opera moments and a few uninspiring technical attributes, Pedro Almodóvar offers a captivating, genuine, emotionally powerful story that puts the spotlight on imperfect mothers. Boasting clear direction and a no-nonsense approach, the eponymous parallelism is continuously present throughout the runtime, making…

Parallel Mothers bespeaks a creative fatigue on the part of writer/director Pedro Almodóvar. Not only is it too similar to his very uneven Julieta from just six years ago, but also rather hard to take seriously – and there is no reason that we should have to or even that he would want us to; the Switched at Birth trope is the stuff of soap operas, and that’s precisely why it would work wonderfully, as that sort of material has in the past, in one of his comedies, but here Almodóvar actually plays it straight, and he goes as far as to throw in a Guerra Civil subplot just so there is no doubt th…

Parallel Mothers: Ghosts That Won't Be Buried Pedro Almodóvar has always had something to say, but "Parallel Mothers" may be his most ambitious statement to date. This is a film that operates on multiple registers simultaneously: a motherhood story wrapped inside a love triangle wrapped inside a political warning so urgent it reverberates far beyond Spain's borders. The story of mothers and babies here is no mere melodrama. It's a direct metaphor for the mothers whose children were "disappeared" under Franco's fascist regime, stolen and never returned, their fates buried in unmarked grav…