- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
70This 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.
-
100A 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.
-
88Cruz 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.
-
88The movie putters near the end, but it's a film lover's delight.
-
88That still makes Broken Embraces superior to at least 99 percent of the movies released in 2009. Run, don't walk.
-
75A 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.
-
75As a film that pays tribute to vintage '50s Hollywood, Broken Embraces is a visual delight.
-
Amid all this dazzling artifice, the film's most authentic source of power comes from its star.
-
75It’s both ridiculous and ridiculously romantic, which is an apt description of a work shaped like a heart and structured like a pretzel.
-
75At 128 minutes – Almodovar's longest film to date – Broken Embraces is an easy film to bid farewell to.
-
75Broken Embraces is stylish and sly, an engaging exercise that gives us less than meets the eye.
-
63With this gorgeously melodramatic ode to cinema, the filmmaker comes dangerously close to losing himself inside his celluloid dreams -- and leaving the audience behind.
-
63The 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.
-
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.
-
38Almodovar lets his movie become boring, and insufferably so.
-
80Gorgeous 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.
-
60The 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.
-
60Watching the new film is like getting upsettingly full on insubstantial tapas: You would never say no to just one more, but there’s better.
-
78At 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.
-
91Many of the characters go by two different names. So best advice for optimum viewing is, see Broken Embraces...twice.
-
91In Almodóvar and Cruz we have a real collaboration of artist and inspiration that only seems to improve and deepen over time.
-
90This 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.
-
90This movie is utterly irresistible.
-
90Broken 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.
-
80The 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.
-
80Mr. Almodóvar's love of movies informs every frame of this beautiful film.
-
80This 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.
-
70A 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.
-
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?
-
50Seems a touch too long, too airless, and too content with its own contrivances to stir the heart.
-
91Broken 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.
-
75During 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.