Pain and Glory

Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria, 2019) is Pedro Almodóvar's most intimate film — watch it online on iFILM. Antonio Banderas plays Salvador Mallo, a director sidelined by chronic pain and creative silence, adrift in his own past.

Memories surface without warning: a whitewashed village in 1960s Valencia, a mother who was both fierce and tender (Penélope Cruz plays her young), early desire, a Madrid apartment in the 1980s and a love affair left unresolved. When Mallo tracks down an actor from an old film after thirty years of silence, the reunion pulls him toward heroin and toward rooms inside himself he had kept locked.

Almodóvar drew on his own life to turn grief and stalled creativity into the raw material of cinema. Banderas won Best Actor at Cannes 2019, and the film represented Spain in the Academy Awards race. Stream Pain and Glory (2019) online on iFILM.