Will he find true magic with a circus girl (Rooney Mara) who’s as radiant as the heroine in Fellini’s La Strada? Or go bad, helping a terrifying psychiatrist ( Cate Blanchett, 52) fleece a sinister plutocrat (Richard Jenkins, 74)? The tale is propulsive yet shapeless, just one darkly dazzling scene after another.
A grifter (Bradley Cooper) flees his fiery past into a lurid circus and learns the art of the con from a clairvoyant ( Toni Collette) and her drunk, broken mentalist husband (David Strathairn, 72). Guillermo del Toro’s spectacularly nasty carnival movie is like a bitter reply to his smash 2017 romance The Shape of Water - as gorgeous, dreamy and visually inventive, only infinitely bleak. The balance of light and dark, birth and death, and the power of women to create life, and to preserve memory over generations in the face of injustice, melds in a warm, humanistic and politically outspoken drama from the unflinching master. Meanwhile, Janis has enlisted her baby daddy, forensic archaeologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde), to investigate a rural mass grave created during the Spanish Civil War by Franco’s soldiers, which likely holds the corpse of her Republican great-grandfather and neighboring fathers, sons and brothers. The single mothers bond over their newborns and provide mutual support - until they un-swaddle a shattering betrayal that threatens their emotional connection. In contemporary Madrid, a pregnant middle-aged photographer, Janis (an incandescent Penelope Cruz), shares a maternity hospital room with anxious adolescent Ana (rising star Milena Smit).
Pedro Almódovar, 71, has created another vibrant, passionate Spanish-language masterpiece, dancing back and forth in time to manifest the power and mystery of motherhood and memory.