Ingrid and Martha were close friends in their youth, when they worked together in the same magazine. After years of no contact, they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet situation.. IMDb editor Arno Kazarian offers sneak peeks of 12 films he screened at the 2024 New York Film Festival, including Anora and the dangerous, strangely erotic Misericordia .. Pedro Almodóvar's first English-language feature film. Featured in The 7PM Project: September 8, 2024 episode (2024). I was curious to see what Pedro Almodóvar would do differently in his first non-Spanish language film, built around two of the most talented actors working today. The answer, unfortunately: it's disappointing. There are many ways in which "The Room Next Door" what makes Almodóvar's work so distinctive is missing -- the spontaneity, the sense of improvisation, the comic timing, the fizzy ensemble work -- but the main flaw of this film, as I see it, is that it's simply overwritten, something that's rare in his previous work. The screenplay (which he is believed to have written) is adapted from a Sigrid Nunez novel that I haven't read, but it sounds like large chunks of dialogue were lifted verbatim from it, with much of it plodding and stilted, slowing down and emptying the film, where Almodóvar's the work is usually characterized by lapidary dialogue and insane forward movement, immersing you in the characters' a world with little exposition - as a viewer, you're kind of just there, hanging on for dear life and figuring out relationships and social context as you go, grabbing what you can. Even in movies that deal with dark themes ("Pain and Glory" or "Bad Education" come to mind), the plot and its background unfold in compelling ways (even when they're actually crazy if you stop and think about them) that they rely on our intuition and empathy and are only marginally dependent on an extended expository narrative. Here, it's the opposite: the characters talk and explain endlessly, with a few clumsy feedbacks to establish context. Little is left to our imagination. So while there are some of the usual Almodóvarian features, particularly in the excellent use of saturated, cleverly coordinated color and the taste of many of the sets and costumes (here with lots of beautiful still lifes of flowers and fruit), these are reduced to props - they don't serve to tell the story and they don't encourage you to accept the reality of his insanely artificial visual worlds the way most of his films do. And the computer-generated backgrounds of New York seem completely artificial and therefore become meaningless. Almodóvar's films certainly have plots, often quite convoluted (which is part of the fun), but they don't feel plot-driven, even when they are. On the other hand, "The Room Next Door" revolves around its plot, and it is weaker than that. With talents like Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore (plus the esteemed John Turturro) in front of the camera, there are to be, and are, some great, often very moving moments - how could there be, especially given the plot's central premise and the way it cements and straining a long-standing, close friendship in his final days? But the wordiness of this script especially undermines Swinton. Her incredible strength lies in her strong, enigmatic presence and in her understatement. According to my unscientific examination, she speaks as much dialogue here as she has in at least her last three or four films (the ones I've seen, that is) combined. Remember her stunning performances in another relatively recent film about a strained relationship between two women, "The Eternal Daughter" (2022), in which she plays both an aging mother and her middle-aged daughter in a devastating manner.