6. Julieta

Pedro Almodóvar directs and adapts a group of stories by Alice Munro into an emotionally restrained melodrama about a woman staring tragedy in the face without blinking. Julieta, who lives in Madrid, discovers that her estranged daughter Antía is living in Switzerland with her three children. She thinks back over how the pair became separated. The piece is a more tone down version of a typical Almodóvar film without being lame at all.  Julieta is overtly serious in its concern with loss and the mature retrospective contemplation of life’s complexity, its visual energy contrasting strongly with its emotional severity and the almost total absence of either comedy or manifest narrative playfulness.

Almodóvar’s unflinching direction that gives “Julieta” its power.