Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.
Ratings
Curator score: 8.8/10
IMDb: 7.5/10
Letterboxd: 4.05/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%
Metacritic: 87
TMDB: 7.4/10
Director
Pedro Almodóvar
Production
El Deseo, TVE
Cast
Antonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Nora Navas, Julieta Serrano, Penélope Cruz, César Vicente, Asier Flores, Cecilia Roth, Susi Sánchez, Raúl Arévalo, Pedro Casablanc, Julián López, Eva Martín, Sara Sierra, Constancia Céspedes, Rosalía, Marisol Muriel, Paqui Horcajo, Alba Gómez
Curator Review
Verdict
A richly emotional, self-reflective drama about aging, memory, desire, and the act of making art. It’s intimate rather than plot-driven, with standout performances and a lush, painterly style that makes the personal feel universal.
Best for
Fans of character-driven art cinema
Viewers interested in filmmaking and creative crisis
Audiences drawn to bittersweet, reflective dramas
Fans of queer cinema with emotional depth
People who appreciate vivid visual style and strong lead performances
Skip if
You want a fast-moving or plot-heavy story
You prefer understated realism over heightened melodrama
You dislike autobiographical or self-referential films
You’re looking for a light or purely uplifting watch
Overview
Pain and Glory is one of those films that feels less like a story being told than a life being revisited, rearranged, and finally understood. It moves through memory, regret, desire, and physical decline with a tenderness that never turns sentimental, finding humor and ache in the same breath. Antonio Banderas gives the kind of performance that quietly accumulates until it feels inseparable from the film itself.
Worth noting
What makes it especially rewarding is how completely it trusts cinema as a form of self-examination. The film is about illness and loneliness, but also about the strange salvation of art: how memory can be transformed into something luminous, and how creation can become a way of surviving oneself. Almodóvar’s color sense and emotional precision are as expressive as ever, giving the film a sensual surface that deepens its melancholy.
Bottom line
It may feel loose or meditative to viewers expecting a more conventional narrative, but that looseness is part of its power. The ending lands with real force because the film has spent so much time circling the same wounds, the same loves, and the same unfinished need to make meaning out of them. It’s a graceful, deeply felt late-career work.
Top Letterboxd reviews
maria (4★) · 2854 likes
the usage of COLOR, the GAY, the DIRECTION , that ENDING. pedro almodóvar, you utter genius
al (4★) · 2403 likes
i didn't think antonio banderas could top his performance in shrek 2 (2004) but... i think he might have done it
davidehrlich (4★) · 2100 likes
in a year full of exquisite endings (PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, THE SOUVENIR, SYNONYMS, PARASITE, THE IRISHMAN, DIANE, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, KNIVES OUT, HUSTLERS, etc. etc.) this one might be the most resonantly bittersweet.
kyle (4.5★) · 1142 likes
this movie was a whole ass MOOD:
Men loving men... i love to see it Oh my fucking god is that rosalía???Oscar for antonio for his post tequila shot shimmyDick! i too would fall to the floor if i saw césar vicente naked in my cave
sofyan (5★) · 959 likes
"Love is not enough. Love may move mountains... But it is not enough to save the person you love."A masterpiece.
Every Banderas's scene hurts me. The feeling that he shows, the pain that he felt, it felt so true!
I loved it. Can't believe my first Pedro Almodóvar's film will be this good.
That ending tho!!