Little Ashes

Little Ashes is a British-Spanish drama set in Madrid in the 1920s, when an eighteen-year-old Salvador Dalí arrives at university determined to become a painter. There he meets the poet Federico García Lorca and the aspiring filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and the three become the centre of a circle of young artists. The bond between Dalí and Lorca grows into something deeper, though Dalí struggles with desires that the Spain of that era would not accept, while Lorca is more at ease with who he is. Their friendship and the rivalry between the two men around Lorca shift as their lives and careers diverge, with Buñuel pursuing his own path and Dalí eventually drawn into other circles abroad.

Paul Morrison directed from a screenplay by Philippa Goslett, with Jaume Vilalta, Jonny Persey and Carlo Dusi producing for APT Films. The cast is led by Robert Pattinson as Dalí, Javier Beltrán as Lorca, Matthew McNulty as Buñuel, and Marina Gatell as Magdalena. Made on a modest budget of about three million dollars, the film sits in the middle stretch of Morrison's feature career, following his earlier work and preceding what came after.

Reception was mixed. A critics' rating of 4.4 out of 10 across 69 reviews is well below the audience scores, which stand at 6.3 on IMDb from around 10,000 votes and 5.8 on TMDB from a much smaller sample. The wide gap suggests viewers responded more warmly to the period setting and the central performances than reviewers did.