Broken Embraces

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

A voluptuary of a film, drunk on primary colors, caressing Penelope Cruz, using the devices of a Hitchcock to distract us with surfaces while the sinister uncoils beneath. As it ravished me, I longed for a freeze frame to allow me to savor a shot.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Many of the characters go by two different names. So best advice for optimum viewing is, see Broken Embraces...twice.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Broken Embraces welds Douglas Sirk melodrama to the most gracefully unsettling elements of Alfred Hitchcock, wrapping both in the stylish, hushed elegance that’s become Almodóvar’s trademark since his mid-’90s reinvention.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

In Almodóvar and Cruz we have a real collaboration of artist and inspiration that only seems to improve and deepen over time.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

This really is Cruz's movie: Almodóvar is her North Star -- following his lead, she's always found her surest and most graceful footing as an actress.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

This movie is utterly irresistible.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Broken Embraces leaves the viewer in a contradictory state, a mixture of devastation and euphoria, amusement and dismay that deserves its own clinical designation. Call it Almodóvaria, a syndrome from which some of us are more than happy to suffer.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Cruz exudes a sensual aura of mystery that holds you spellbound. And Almodóvar, a true poet of cinema, creates images -- horrifying and healing -- that live inside your head like a waking dream. You want to miss a movie like that? I didn’t think so.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

That still makes Broken Embraces superior to at least 99 percent of the movies released in 2009. Run, don't walk.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

The movie putters near the end, but it's a film lover's delight.

Empire Kim Newman

Gorgeous and seductive, if pitched at Almodóvar fans and perhaps a touch long. Those drawn by Cruz’s divadom will wonder why it takes so long to get to her -- though she is wholly dazzling when it does.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Mr. Almodóvar's love of movies informs every frame of this beautiful film.

Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey

The writer-director is up to his old tricks, creating an onion of an experience -- a movie within a movie within a movie, irony in each layer, poignancy that stings and whimsy that bites.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

This melancholy romance is the first Almodovar feature I’ve ever really liked, an expertly fashioned melodrama that steers mercifully clear of his usual puckishness and star-mongering.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

At times, it looks as though Broken Embraces might be the love child of Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock, with its dramatic broad strokes, iconic reds, and teasing narrative clues.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams

Broken Embraces is stylish and sly, an engaging exercise that gives us less than meets the eye.

Washington Post Jan Stuart

Amid all this dazzling artifice, the film's most authentic source of power comes from its star.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

At 128 minutes – Almodovar's longest film to date – Broken Embraces is an easy film to bid farewell to.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

It’s both ridiculous and ridiculously romantic, which is an apt description of a work shaped like a heart and structured like a pretzel.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

A melodrama painted in the saffron-and-turmeric hues of a Bollywood musical, Broken Embraces is the Spanish filmmaker's homage to Hitchcock's "Vertigo," that moody account of obsessional love and double lives.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

During vast sections of Broken Embraces, I wished I was watching the actual old-time noirs instead of the miasmic concoction that Almodóvar has made from them.

USA Today Claudia Puig

As a film that pays tribute to vintage '50s Hollywood, Broken Embraces is a visual delight.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

This is a pretty minor film from the filmmaker. It feels like more of an exercise in plotting and movie nostalgia than a story about real people.

Variety Jonathan Holland

A restless, rangy and frankly enjoyable genre-juggler that combines melodrama, comedy and more noir-hued darkness than ever before, the picture is held together by the extraordinary force of Almodovar’s cinematic personality.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The final half-hour of Broken Embraces is littered with facile contrivances and plot turns worthy of a soap opera. It's almost mystifying, and more than a little frustrating, to watch a movie cruising at such a high level suddenly suffer a complete breakdown and lose too much altitude.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

With this gorgeously melodramatic ode to cinema, the filmmaker comes dangerously close to losing himself inside his celluloid dreams -- and leaving the audience behind.

Village Voice Rob Nelson

Indeed, three decades into his career as a name-brand fashioner of zesty soapers, Spanish cinema's most beloved export could direct un film de Almodóvar with his eyes shut and still get a rise out of his fans. So who could blame the matador for letting the bull run the show this time?

Time Out New York Joshua Rothkopf

Watching the new film is like getting upsettingly full on insubstantial tapas: You would never say no to just one more, but there’s better.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

The notable lack of chemistry between Cruz and Homar is a crucial absence in a film about all-consuming romance. And though each part is great fun to watch, the whole feels unfinished.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Seems a touch too long, too airless, and too content with its own contrivances to stir the heart.

San Francisco Chronicle Amy Biancolli

It all adds up to an entertaining combination of suspense and melodrama, a movie that doesn't cohere too well - and veers toward the silly in its more-obvious plot mechanics.

New Orleans Times-Picayune Mike Scott

Almodovar lets his movie become boring, and insufferably so.