A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Based on three short stories in "Runaway" by Alice Munro: the title character is a resident of Madrid who is suddenly re-stimulated by the pain of having been estranged by her young adult daughter many years ago. In flashback, the viewer is brought to an earlier time when Julieta meets her daughter's father and the events that happened later. In the current time, Julieta is played by Emma Suarez; in the earlier flashbacks, she is played by Adriana Ugarte.As directed by Pedro Almodovar, this movie is touching in ways that are mysterious, sensuous, and passionate. It pays off like so many other beautiful and exotic European films of the past. With beautiful locations that include Madrid, the Galician coast, and the Pyrenees countryside (and lifestyles of people who end up in places like Portugal, Switzerland, Lake Como, and Milan), the movie allows us non-Europeans to temporarily live vicariously through characters with such good fortune - even if their lives are sad in other ways.By the end, there are some loose ends that are mainly due to some one-dimensional villains whose motives remain unexplained. They include a busybody, mean-spirited housekeeper and an unethical leader of a "spiritual" retreat centre. However, the bigger stories feel complete by the end, leaving "Julieta" a very fulfilling experience. Suarez's performance in this movie is definitely an asset.

Dearest Almodóvar:(I write this open letter out of courtesy in English.) Rocking the world of colors since the early 1980s with full frontal confrontations between the sexes. "Julieta" has become no exemption, yet the wild years with "Matador" (1986) or "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" (1989) seem harder and harder to be of exposure in your recent pictures. Nature as a destructive force as the bull-attack in "Talk To Her" (2002), marking the peak of a director/writer's career, which follows bio-metric cycles as life itself connected with an ocean's tide, calmness bringing shots in "Julieta". The 2016 version of an "Almodóvar Picture" gets between the gap of generations, entangles their emotions, first being a creek to jump over, nowadays a gorge with miles and miles to go around or building an cliff-hanging hard-wire of life-threatening proportions between children and their parents. As usual you keep a tight grip of your cast, which seems to the very last supporting role in care-taking hands. Yet "Julieta" strikes no nerves anymore as "The Skin I Live In" (2011) did with mask-ripping forces; tensions between the characters kept to an minimum, making the picture a pleasant one-time watch of your standard color balance in production design, leaving me wishing for another breakthrough cinematographic action as cameras hitting asphalt in "All About My Mother" (1999).Sincerely Yours,Felix Alexander Dausend

In the first scene Julieta packs in bubble wrap a clay-brown sculpture, which becomes perhaps the film's key symbol. As we later learn, it's a bronze sculpture by Ava, the artist friend of Julieta's first love Xoan. This very modern abstraction of a seated male is marked by three inflections. The penis rampant is abruptly truncated exposing a hole. A Lynn Chadwick-style triangle replaces the head, rendering the human into an abstraction. It emphasizes the rational and impersonal. The terracotta surface makes the figure seem pre-Colombian and light. But despite the clay colour Ava has cast her human figure in bronze to protect it from blowing away. The first of those two details summarize the central romantic relationship. When Julieta first meets and makes love to Xoan he has a comatose wife. When Julieta comes to him the wife has just died, so their new romance flourishes. But the triangle persists. Xoan still has occasional sex with his longtime friend Ava. As Julieta's last lover, Lorenzo, is also Ava's friend she can't escape the triangular relationship. That sculpture adorns the cover of Lorenzo's book. The heavy bronze painted as flesh-like clay encapsulates Almodovar's sense of the human condition here. Clay is the source of the flesh, soft, vulnerable to the elements, especially to the wind. To survive, it needs an additional core of strength and substance. While the metallic is conventionally the emblem of a non-feeling, unemotional character, here the core that enables individuals and relationships to survive is the capacity to love and to remain committed across years of separation and misunderstanding. Thus Xoan maintains an integral commitment to both Ava and Julieta, as her father does to his helpless wife and to the girl hired to care for her. Lorenzo remains in love with Julieta despite her rejection when she decides to stay in Madrid to try to find her daughter Antia, after a 12-year alienation.Julieta's three men form a non-romantic triangle. Xoan and her father form her base: heavy muscular men with beards and a commitment to life in the elements, her fathering choosing to become a farmer and Xoan already a fisherman. In contrast Lorenzo is cerebral, academic, bald, in her maturity a refuge from her earlier men. The train passenger whose suicide haunts Julieta has the academic mien of Lorenzo and the hirsute force of Xoan and her father. The stranger has the other three men's loneliness but having failed to find their loving connection takes the train —with empty luggage — to kill himself. The other men survive their losses because they have the bronze core of love given and received. The suicide is like empty fragile clay.Yet the film escapes any feeling of abstract schema. Xoan dies in wind and water. He storms off to fish when Julieta confronts him with his affair with Ava. That is, one's emotional life may give one the stability and purpose with which to survive. But even it cannot ward off the accidents and cruelties of fate that the flesh is air to. Xoan is broken into pieces by the wind and water but Julieta identifies him by his tattoo with her and their Antia's initials. His death, like his love, brings Julieta and Ava together. They jointly pour Xoan's ashes back into the sea. The film's most enigmatic figure is Antia. We watch her from infancy into maturity but we share Julieta's loss of connection when she goes off to her spiritual retreat. When she learns what drove her father off to the storm she blames her mother and Ava for his death. Then she blames herself for having been enjoying herself at the summer camp when he died. The bronze in this human figure is the oppressive lead of guilt, which all three women have to work to transcend. On this point the clay is the constructive reminder of human vulnerability, helplessness, especially in the twisting fortunes of love. Before Antia turns against her mother she turns against her first best friend Bea. This new friendship keeps Antia at camp and takes her to her friend's home in Madrid, prolonging the period before she learns of her father's death. Antia makes Julieta move to Madrid to be closer to Bea. But Antia's friendship/love eventually grows so oppressive Bea flees her to America. That's when Anita breaks their friendship and goes to the retreat.Despite her anger Antia keeps some connection to her mother, sending a few fanciful birthday cards. For her part, Julieta marks her daughter's birthday by dumping a birthday cake into the trash three years running. Only when she has married, had three children and lost the oldest to drowning does Antia experience what her mother suffered when Xoan died. That loss, that discovery of her own vulnerability, gives Antia the strengthened core to write her mother and provide her own address, tacitly inviting the imminent visit that ends the film.

In his late 60s, Almodovar has composed a moving saga about a woman's journey through life. At first sight, the heroine of his new film 'Julieta' is an attractive academic preparing for quiet retirement with her boyfriend, but it's soon revealed her daughter Antia has been missing for more than a decade. Julieta's plans change after a chance encounter with her daughter's former BFF, who tells of glimpsing Antia in Italy. Julieta reacts to this news by breaking up with her lover and moving back to her old apartment building in Madrid. Julieta starts writing a memoir, and the film follows this account. It begins with Julieta as a young teacher of classical literature and mythology, and describes her meeting with Antia's fisherman father. After her daughter is conceived, Julieta moves into the man's home on the coast. For several years she appears to be living a contented family life until this chapter comes to a sudden end, and Julieta returns to Madrid. As she focuses on rebuilding her career in the city, Julieta fails to notice some important changes in Antia prior to the girl's mysterious disappearance. The different passages of Julieta's life resemble Ulysses' diverse adventures in The Odyssey, as random currents toss her around like a cork in the ocean. When Julieta's memoir brings her back to present-day Madrid, order emerges from apparent chaos and understanding arrives. The resolution of her story turns out to be as satisfying and thought-provoking as a myth.