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MORE REVIEWS
KENNETH TURAN‘Midnight Traveler’ PAGE E6
JUSTIN CHANG‘Lucy in the Sky’PAGE E4
‘Memory: The Origins of
‘‘Alien’’ ’PAGE E8
ADDITIONAL REVIEWS‘Genèse’PAGE E9
‘In the Tall Grass’PAGE E9
‘Low Tide’PAGE E10
‘Collisions’ and other films.
PAGE E6, E8Tarantino and
singer team upThe director and pop
star Mark Lindsay
headline Grammy
Museum program. E2Museum gets
new director
The motion picture
academy names Bill
Kramer as facility’s
new leader. E7Remembering
Jessye Norman
Music critic Mark
Swed celebrates the
late, great American
opera singer. E11Comics...............E12-13
What’s on TV........E14A surprise in all ways except its surpassing
quality, “Pain and Glory” reveals master Span-
ish director Pedro Almodóvar forging dazzling
new paths while being completely himself.
Dramatic rather than melodramatic, auto-
biographical but only around the edges, using
Antonio Banderas in unexpected ways but skill-
fully enough to win him the lead actor prize at
Cannes, Almodóvar takes delight in contradict-
ing whatever you might be expecting.
Yet on the other hand, this at times austere
story of an aging filmmaker (“a director with his
aches and pains,” in Almodóvar’s words) at a
crisis point in his life is very much like the direc-
tor in that very unpredictability.
Instead of the shocks of melodrama, a genre
the filmmaker loves passionately, “Pain and
Glory” is successful in the way its considerable
classic emotional heft manages to sneak up and
wallop you by the close.
Artfully set up in their own place and time by
Almodóvar’s fluid screenplay, events that seem
random turn out to be intimately connected,
with the filmmaker himself emerging one more
time as someone having way more imagination
than we do.
A film with many touchstones, pain, memory
and enduring love among them, “Pain and
Glory” concerns itself most with the nature and
influence of the creative impulse and the power
of the past to revive and enlighten us in the pre-
sent.
And, not surprisingly since Almodóvar has
just turned 70, it both demonstrates and deals
with how all things change with age, the regrets
we have to live with and those we do not.
Given that Almodóvar has a considerable
amount in common with Salvador Mallo, “Pain
and Glory’s” filmmaker protagonist, including
living in the identical apartment with the same
art on the walls, it’s tempting to see this film as
more autobiographical than it is.
But in an interview at Cannes, the director
explained this was not the case, noting that
while for practical reasons “my own reality was
the start,” invention inevitably became the or-
der of the day.
Banderas, who has worked with the director
on seven previous films, is the heart of things
here, but his exceptional work is very different
from the large, energetic performances that
made him a HollywoodAT THE MOVIES: REVIEWS
DIRECTORPedro Almodóvar brings elements of his own life to his masterful new movie, with Antonio Banderas playing a filmmaker.
El Deseo Sony Pictures ClassicsTHE DEEP END
Antonio Banderas is awash in his memories in ‘Pain and Glory’
KENNETH TURAN
FILM CRITIC
[See‘Glory,’ E10]It was a slap seen round
the world.
Visiting Finnish Presi-
dent Sauli Niinisto swatted
away the hand of President
Trump on Wednesday when
he patted the Scandinavian
leader on the knee during a
news conference.
The former reality TV
star, who once said his fame
allowed him to grab women
by much more than the knee,
had failed to dazzle his coun-
terpart — or succeed in even
the most basic of bro ges-
tures.
Trump’s mojo leaked
from the room like air from a
flubbery tire as he sought to
pump himself back up for a
new round of “Fight the
Press,” accusing an elected
official of treason, targeting
journalists (once again) as
“the true enemy of the peo-
ple,” and inferring his im-
peachment would lead to
civil war.
What a difference a week,
and revelations that a sitting
president had asked a for-
eign country to help him
game an election, makes.
Gone was the crudely
charming, flippant enter-
tainer who blasted his way
through the Republican pri-
maries with a confetti can-
non’s-worth of insults, de-
flected tough debate ques-
tions like light off a disco ball
and rode catchy anthems
like “Lock Her Up!” all the
way to the White House.
In his place was a scowl-
ing, red-faced and desperate
politician in deep, deep trou-
ble. Last week’s revelation
that Trump asked Ukrain-
ian President Volodymyr
Zelensky for “a favor” — find
dirt on Joe Biden and his
son, Hunter — after putting
on hold the country’s mili-
tary aid, has spurred an im-
peachment inquiry. (Trump
added fuel to the firestorm
Thursday, telling reporters,
“China should start an in-
vestigation into the Bidens,
because what happened in
China is just about as bad as
what happened with ...
Ukraine,” before boarding
Marine One.)
Trump bore the weight of
that scrutiny atop his
slumped shoulders Wednes-
day as he confronted a press
corps that had no interest in
talking about Helsinki or
our “beautiful” relationship
with Finland. As they asked
about things that angered
Trump (the whistleblower
who alerted authorities
about the conversation; im-
peachment) he grew more
and more erratic, even by
Trump standards.
Trump squinted like DeTrump
mojo
takes
a steep
dive
Under impeachment’s
glare, the president’s
once-confident act is
starting to break up.
LORRAINE ALI
TELEVISION CRITIC[SeeTrump,E3]Where have you gone, Eddie Murphy? Our
nation turns its cheerless eyes to you. Really.
I know, Murphy didn’t actually go anywhere,
but given the two decades since he’s made one
of the trademark R-rated comedies that are
his strength, it seems like he did.
Other big-screen personalities attempted to
fill the gap, but nobody made us laugh in the par-
ticular way Murphy did, nobody had his gift for
turning unbridled profanity into pure hilarity.
Now, thankfully, Murphy is back, and both
his old gifts and some new ones are on engaging
display in the rowdy, raunchy, inescapably fun-
ny “Dolemite Is My Name,” a gleefully profane
biopic and a passion project the star has been
nurturing for years.
As written by Scott Alexander and Larry
Karaszewski (“Ed Wood,” “The People v. O.J.
Simpson: American Crime Story”) and directed
by Craig Brewer (“Hustle & Flow,” TV’s
“Empire”), the film pays tribute to Rudy Ray
Moore (played by Murphy), a way-underground
off-color comedy sensation who turned his alter
ego, a “Shaft”-type action hero named Dolemite,
into a blaspheming 1970s blaxploitation cult fig-
ure not because his films
Eddie Murphy’s back. @#$% yeah
EDDIE MURPHYpays tribute to Rudy Ray Moore, who turned his alter ego, a “Shaft”-
type action hero, into a 1970s blaxploitation film cult figure, in “Dolemite Is My Name.”François DuhamelNetflixStar returns to his R-rated comedic
glory with the gleefully profane
biopic ‘Dolemite Is My Name.’
KENNETH TURAN
FILM CRITIC[See‘Dolemite,’E7]