No male filmmaker has more consistently understood female characters and the actresses playing them than Pedro Almodóvar, a virtue that rescues the treasured director’s first English-language feature from the reams of prose-style dialogue in its establishing scenes. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, in which a terminally ill woman asks an old friend for her companionship as she prepares to end her life, the Spanish writer-director takes time to shake off that stilted, page-bound quality. But a change of scene and the luminous screen presences of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore breathe life into The Room Next Door.

Almodóvar got his feet wet working in English with two shorts — The Human Voice, a Cocteau adaptation exploring the line between true feeling and artifice, styled as a virtuoso performance piece for Swinton; and the playfully horny queer cowboy love story Strange Way of Life, with Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal.