JULIETA World Cinema

When we meet Julieta (Emma Suárez), she seems to be a relatively happy, well-balanced woman preparing for a move away from Madrid with her boyfriend. But a chance encounter on the street leaves her reeling, and she’s tossed back into the turmoil of her painful past. In flashback, we see Julieta as a younger woman (Adriana Ugarte), meeting the love of her life, fisherman Xoan, and having a little girl, Antía, with him. When Xoan dies suddenly, Julieta and Antía are left to navigate life together, a mother and daughter on twin courses of tragedy and survival. Pedro Almodóvar’s latest is a moving testament to the undying love that exists between parent and child, even when that love manifests as harmful, suffocating or heartbreakingly distant. The Spanish auteur’s trademarks of lyrical melodrama, character doubling, intoxicatingly vivid mise-en-scène and wicked Hitchcockian flourishes are on full display, here refracted through the lens of stories by Canadian writer Alice Munro. — Beth Hanna