Producer: Agustín Almodóvar   Director: Pedro Almodóvar Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar   Cast: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto, Raúl Arévalo, Victoria Luengo, Alex Høgh Andersen, Esther McGregor, Alvise Rigo and Melina Matthews   Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Grade: B

Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel “What Are You Going Through,” conforms to his established patterns in some respects.  As is usually the case in his films, the main characters are women, and it’s impeccably mounted, with an elegant production design (Inbal Weinberg), costumes (Bina Daigeler) and cinematography (Eduard Grau) that confirm the director’s talent for careful composition and color coordination; each individual shot is a work of art.

But it eschews the flamboyance that marked his earlier work.  Like his more recent features—“Julieta,” “Pain and Glory,” “Parallel Wives”—it reflects not the antic Almodóvar of yesteryear (indeed, apart from one scene featuring Alvise Rigo as a strapping trainer, it’s virtually devoid of humor) but the more serious, meditative one of today.  The story continues his late career concern with themes of regret and death.

In fact one of its two leading characters, Martha (Tilda Swinton) is terminally ill with stage-three cervical cancer.  She’s undergoing various experimental treatments, but the chances of success are minimal, and the celebrated war correspondent is preparing for the worst in a very specific way.

Her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a writer on art history who’s been out of touch Martha for some years—the result, it appears, from their both having been involved with the same man (John Turturro as a professorial type named Damian, now a professional doomsayer giving talks about the end of civilization) when they were colleagues on the staff of a magazine, as well as their divergent careers—hears of her condition at a book signing in New York City and visits her in the hospital.  They fall easily into the camaraderie of their youth, and before long are opening up to one another. 

Their conversations reveal that Martha, while generally matter-of-fact even in her illness, nonetheless harbors some regrets,  especially over her estrangement from her daughter Michelle, who blames her mother for the absence of her father.  In the most searing of the occasional flashbacks, Martha reveals the tragic story of the man she met while covering the Vietnam War who returned from the service a broken man and died trying to save people he claimed to hear screaming for help in a burning farmhouse.

As the last hope for remission of her disease collapses, Martha explains to Ingrid that she’s decided to end her life on her own terms.  She’s procured on the dark web a pill that will do the trick, and has decided to take it in a remote place at a time of her own choosing.  But she wants to have someone trustworthy nearby, in the titular room next door, to be ready to find the body, while being kept safe from suspicion of complicity, and asks Ingrid if she’d be willing to take on that role.  Martha admits that others she’d asked had declined, but Ingrid agrees despite her own fears of death.

So they move together into an isolated rent house upstate, where they continue their conversations, watch films—Buster Keaton’s, for example—and prepare for the inevitable act.  Almodóvar reminds us continuously of the purpose behind it all with references to death, like a viewing of John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s “The Dead” and a scene involving snowfall that’s directly tied to the book’s ending.  There’s one grimly unsettling moment when Ingrid finds the door to Martha’s room closed in the morning—the code which is supposed to indicate that she’d taken the pill—only to find it’s a false alarm; but generally the tone is strangely upbeat rather than down. 

There’s also no debate about the ethics of Martha’s decision or Ingrid’s agreement to help, until a last act in which a police detective (Alessandro Nivola) sternly questions Ingrid, emphasizing his opposition to suicide both as a lawman and a religious one.  Some will find this final section of the film, which also includes an appearance by Michelle (also played by Swinton) a needless appendage.  But it’s Almodóvar’s way of critiquing the arrogance of outsiders who would presume to question a suffering person’s right to make her own choice about ending her life.          

“The Room Next Door” has little action; it’s heavy with dialogue, which often feels slightly stilted, as if translated a mite clumsily from another language (as perhaps it was, since Almodóvar wrote the script), and the delivery, as staged by him and edited by Teresa Font, often feels affected as well as very deliberately paced.  As a result the film can come across as verbose and somewhat turgid (especially in terms of discussions about legalities and practicalities), not at all what one might expect of the director.  What is not unexpected is its tone of melodrama, genteelly expressed but at the same time accentuated by the lushness of Alberto Iglesias’ score.

What’s even more predictable is the excellence of the leading actors.  Swinton dominates as the dying but indomitable Martha, gaunt but still icily aristocratic.  Moore is, as the part of Ingrid demands, more deferential and nervous.  Together they do what is a thespian routine of feminine friendship recovered after a long absence, and capture its emotional core though under a coolly reserved surface.  The only other major role is Turturro’s; he shows uncustomary restraint in Damian’s occasional meetings with Ingrid to discuss her and Martha’s situation—which he always sees in the context of planetary decline.

There have been extraordinary films in recent years about end-of-life issues, including Michael Haneke’s “Amour” and François Ozon’s “Everything Went Fine,” to name only two of the finest.  Almodóvar’s somewhat mannered take might not rank with the very best, but blessed with excellent performances by two remarkable stars, it’s a worthwhile addition to those on this difficult subject.

Producers: Lizzie Gillett, Robert Ford and Ian Bonhôte   Directors: Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui   Screenplay: Peter Ettedgui, Otto Burnham and Ian Bonhôte   Distributor: Warner Bros.

Grade: B

The life of Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Clark Kent and his alter ego Kal-El, aka Superman, in Richard Donner’s fine 1978 blockbuster and Richard Lester’s equally good 1981 sequel (as well as two inferior continuations in 1983 and 1987), is celebrated in this excellent if conventional documentary.  The praise is not merely for his acting, in the Superman movies and others he made (with varying degrees of success, it must be admitted) before his death in 2004 at fifty-two, but for the courage and determination he demonstrated after suffering a cervical spinal injury after a fall from a horse during a dressage competition in 1995—an accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down and required a ventilator to allow him to breathe for the last decade of his life.

The cruel irony between the invulnerability of the character he’d so engagingly embodied and the desperate condition from which he now suffered was obvious—and “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” plays on it perhaps too much, with references to kryptonite that might make you cringe a bit.  Fortunately, the makers avoid emphasizing the idea of a “Superman curse” that lumps together Reeve’s accident with the suicide years earlier of George Reeves, who played the Man of Steel on television.  

And in general the film shows an admirably unsensational touch in covering both Reeve’s life and career through 1995, and the years following the accident.  Its treatment of the first period avoids hagiography.  One can sympathize with his having to put up with a father who was distant and judgmental—the film repeats the well-known anecdote about how the scholarly Franklin reacted to his son’s getting the part of Superman happily until he was informed it wasn’t in Shaw’s “Man and Superman” but a superhero movie—and admire his work ethic and devotion to high-minded causes.

On the other hand, it’s easy to be taken aback by qualities that come across as self-absorbed and even borderline unfeeling.  That description seems to apply to his separation from Gae Exton, with whom he had a decade-long relationship (and two children, Matthew and Alexandra) before he met and wed Dana Morosini, whom he married in 1992 and with whom he had his third child, William.  (Exton is among those interviewed.)  And it occasionally surfaces in recollections from the children, who recall him often being demanding or absent before the accident.   

The film follows the sometimes-rocky years with Exton but concentrates on his closeness with Dana, who steadfastly supported him and collaborated with him in the work that consumed him during the decade of his paralysis, which focused on promoting legislation assisting the disabled and research on spinal cord injuries.  This portion of the documentary is inspirational, but doesn’t shy from mentioning the controversy that followed his participation in a commercial that used special effects to depict him rising from a wheelchair and walking again.  It also spotlights the importance of Dana Reeves to the foundation they created, which she continued to champion until her untimely death in 2006 and has since been overseen by others committed to the causes it represents.

Another prominent thread in the film is Reeve’s deep friendship with Robin Williams, a classmate at Juilliard in the 1970s with whom he remained close.  Williams, the makers note, was instrumental in arranging Reeve’s surprise appearance at the 1996 Oscars, and was consistently supportive in the years following; their relationship was so intense, in fact, that one of the celebrity interviewees, Glenn Close, speculates, rather insensitively one could argue, that had Reeve lived, Williams might not have taken his own life.

Among those who offer their remembrances and insights in interview clips in “Super/Man,” apart from all three of his children and Exton, are his half-brother Kevin Johnson, Reeve’s assistant Laurie Hawkins, and friends such as Close, Jeff Daniels, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon and John Kerry.  There are also remembrances from some involved in the making of “Superman” (producer Pierre Spengler and, in archival footage, director Richard Donner), as well as specialists involved in Reeve’s medical treatment and associates in his philanthropic work.  Archival footage of Williams is also included, along with other found footage and clips from Reeve’s films.

Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui have worked with their co-writer Otto Burnham, who also edited, to assemble the material, old and new (shot by Brett Wiley) confidently, with the chronological shifts smoothly differentiated and without overdoing the occasional imaginative transitional insert.

The result is an affecting tribute to Reeve, an uplifting portrait of a man who responded to personal tragedy not with bitterness but a desire to serve as a symbol of hope to others.