Venice film festival

The Spanish director’s first English-language feature sees Tilda Swinton’s dying journalist trying to reconnect with an old friend played by Julianne Moore

Pedro Almodóvar’s death-struck new melodrama – the great director’s 23rd feature but his first in the English language – is a hothouse Spanish shrub transplanted to stony foreign soil. It wilts and it droops; it almost gives up the ghost. Then when it flowers it feels like a small miracle. The film’s very fragility is what makes it so gorgeous.

Tilda Swinton plays Martha, a driven former war correspondent now dying of cervical cancer and keen to reconnect with an old friend, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), who has latterly become a writer of acclaimed autofiction. Martha and Ingrid were once colleagues on a hip New York magazine and briefly shared a Philip Rothian lover, Damian (John Turturro), but they haven’t seen each...