TIFF18 REVIEW: Rojo [2018]

They say bodies appear in the desert. The film opens as people leave a house with objects in-hand, the assumption being that they were bought in an estate sale or pilfered before one could begin. A man (Diego Cremonesi) looks in the front door as clueless as we are to what’s happening before a jump cut finds him entering a packed restaurant. Impatient by the bar, he gruffly asks a gentleman seated alone (Dario Grandinetti‘s Claudio) if he’s done eating. An argument colored by entitlement and false manners respectively breaks…

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REVIEW: Julieta [2016]

“Remember, you don’t like goodbyes” It began as many things: an adaptation of Nobel Prize winning Canadian writer Alice Munro‘s three connected short stories from her book Runaway (“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”), Pedro Almodóvar‘s English-language debut with its venue switching from Vancouver to New York, and a starring vehicle for Meryl Streep. But Julieta eventually became none of them. It’s still credited as an adaptation, yet Almodóvar would be the first to say that he took pains to make it his own not only in content but context with the…

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