Pain and Glory

Pain and Glory centres on Salvador Mallo, a Spanish film director whose career has stalled and who is living with chronic pain. When a restored print of one of his older films brings him back into contact with the actor he fell out with over it, the reunion sets off a wider reckoning with his past. Salvador thinks back to his childhood in a small Valencian village in the 1960s, raised by a mother who wanted more for him, and to his early adult years in Madrid in the 1980s, where he fell in love. He returns to the people and places that shaped him, some in person and some only in memory, and comes to see that putting his own story into words may be the way through his creative and personal impasse. The film is a drama written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. It is the seventeenth of the twenty-two features he has directed in chronological order, following Julieta and preceding The Human Voice, and he wrote the screenplay himself. Antonio Banderas plays Salvador, with Asier Etxeandia as the actor Alberto Crespo, Leonardo Sbaraglia as Federico Delgado, Nora Navas as Mercedes, Penélope Cruz as Salvador's mother Jacinta in her younger years and Julieta Serrano as the older Jacinta. Twenty-six cast members and seventy-three crew members are credited. Made for around eleven million dollars, it took about nineteen million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.5 from roughly 67,000 votes and on TMDB 7.4 from about 1,950, while a critics' rating stands at 8.3 from 306 reviews, placing the reviews above the audience scores.