Bitter Christmas review – grief, loss and artistic betrayal in Almodóvar’s film within a film

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Cannes film festival: Spaniard’s latest life-v-art auto-metafiction feels slightly muddled as he directs a director directing a director With its rich, warm, summery colours, nothing could surely be less bitter or less Christmassy than this film. It’s the latest from Cannes competition regular Pedro Almodóvar, partly set during Christmas; the female lead actually complains about the yuletide traffic at one stage. But there’s no tinsel or sleigh bells or shopping for presents. Like Die Hard, it eludes classification. It is another – which is to say, yet another – double-layered creation by Almodóvar, a kind of movie auto-metafiction of the sort that he has virtually invented, a life-v-art dialectical process that he is evidently unable to do without. Like the recent Pain and Glory , Bitter Christmas is a candidly personal movie, circling around ideas like grief, loss, the vampirism of art and the betrayal involved in basing fictional characters on real people. Perhaps by emphasising thi...
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Martin Scorsese backs Iranian director jailed over Cannes screening

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Oscar winner urges signing of petition after Iran court finds Saeed Roustaee guilty of ‘contributing to propaganda’ for showing banned movie

Martin Scorsese has backed a petition against the jailing of the prominent Iranian movie director Saeed Roustaee for screening a film at the Cannes film festival.

Scorsese, the Oscar-winning director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, reposted a campaign launched by his daughter Francesca this week after news of Roustaee’s prison sentence emerged.

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