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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It Lives Inside review – standard-issue schlock horror has its moments

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This Indian American monster movie has interesting touches of cultural specificity but it’s a mostly familiar formula

There’s a swirl of the old and the new in the hokey pre-Halloween horror It Lives Inside, a balance that could have benefited from a lot more of the latter – because when the first-time director Bishal Dutta does try to add freshness to the familiarity of formula, he manages to carve his film its own place within two overstuffed subgenres, flashes of intrigue as he veers between schlocky curse and even schlockier monster movie.

A wide-releasing horror film centered on an Indian American teenager already gives the film a certain distinction. Dutta, also acting as writer, tries to thread themes of assimilation and identity through a predictable procession of mostly ineffective jump scares and slightly more effective set pieces, the film working better when it’s trying to chill rather than shock. Never Have I Ever and Missing’s Megan Suri plays Samidha, or Sam as she prefers to be called, a girl trying to fit in at a predominantly white high school despite her mother keenly trying to keep traditions an integral part of her life. It’s led to a distance from her other Indian American friend, Tamira and, like Heathers and Fright Night before it, explores that interesting fracture of leaving one friend behind to climb higher socially.

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