Bitter Christmas

Ultimately, Bitter Christmas never reaches the crashing emotional clarity of Pain and Glory, whose self-interrogation cut far deeper. Still, there is something quietly heartening about watching Almodóvar return to familiar territory with renewed playfulness and formal confidence. Even when circling old obsessions — performance, desire, memory, self-mythology — he remains one of the few filmmakers capable of making self-examination feel simultaneously sumptuous and dangerous.

The film is cooler emotionally than Almodóvar’s early work but full of wit and self-awareness.

Bitter Christmas is neither the work of a filmmaker atoning for, nor justifying, their greatness so much as it’s the work of a filmmaker simply explaining how their greatness works.

I would say that what Almodóvar pulls off in the end makes the rest of the film worthwhile, but only barely and only if you’re invested enough in his ongoing arc as an artist to find intriguing the idea of a self-lacerating late-career self-portrait about the nature of inspiration.

Bitter Christmas is so enjoyable to watch that you almost will yourself into believing that Almodóvar isn’t simply reworking, with certain beats that feel a little too familiar, some of his recent preoccupations.

Bitter Christmas remains a cinephile’s film – one whose exploration of emotions ultimately fails to translate into an emotional experience for the viewer.

Bitter Christmas uncomfortably straddles its twin goals of complexity and amusement, too pithy to take seriously and too flat to be riotously entertained.