TALK TO HER

A male nurse who tends a beautiful comatose woman forges a bond with a man who grieves for another comatose woman in the same hospital.

(Now in stores)

CAST: Javier Camara, Dario Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, Geraldine Chaplin, Mariola Fuentes, Lola Duenas, Beatriz Santiago, Paz Vega, Fele Martinez, Adolfo Fernandez, Elena Anaya, Loles Leon

DIRECTOR: Pedro Almodovar

"Like all great doomed affairs, 'Talk to Her' is full of lovely, sweet suffering. And when it's over, the realization of how much the movie means to you really sinks in; you can't get it out of your heart...It's the most mature work this director has ever brought to the screen... He has become more capable than ever of not only shifting tones but also balancing several tones at once, answering questions and simultaneously deepening the mystery." -- Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

"Almodovar delivers his most haunting masterpiece...the film lurches into dark corners of the mind that Almodovar navigates with uncanny skill and passionate heart...'Talk to Her' goes beyond tears. It's unmissable and unforgettable." -- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

"Pedro Almodóvar's 'Talk to Her' affects some people very deeply, while others, like me, find it high-grade kitsch...The essence of the film's story line is a lot creepier than Almodóvar allows for; there's something almost fetishistic about the way he savors the immutability of the women. It's as if they had become comatose so that the two men could be soul mates. I'll say this much: It's certainly a novel approach to male bonding." -- Peter Rainer, New York

"A great director has the force of character to lead you down roads you're not sure you want to go, then leave you feeling elated that you went. Pedro Almodóvar has been making a career of such intrepid journeys, and has done it again with 'Talk to Her'...an international celebration of love and art you wish would never end." -- Jan Stuart, Newsday

"…as moving as anything on screen this year…much of what happens in the intricate plot is grim, discouraging, even perverse. There's no mistaking the ray of brightness that comes shining through its heart, though…Admirers of Almodóvar's best pictures, such as ‘All About My Mother’ and the amazing ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,’ will find him again at the peak of his powers." --David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor

"Almodóvar's point, I think, is that you can't have love without fable--that every love affair is an improbable narrative wrung from non-being and loneliness...One way of looking at 'Talk to Her,' I suppose, is as a story shaped by a homosexual's longing for women, a longing that can be expressed only as irony or as nightmare...Some viewers may feel that the movie teeters on the edge of a disastrous malevolence, but I don't think it should be taken that way. It should be taken, rather, as a gay director's admission of emotional avidity and physical fear...Certainly, Almodóvar believes in the reality of romantic love--he believes in it as much as any movie director, straight or gay, ever has." -- David Denby, The New Yorker

"Morbid, perverse and in extremely questionable taste, this scenario might well have sailed over the top and into the realm of high camp…His astonishing screenplay, shifting back and forth in time and layered with tenderness and humor, turns out to be a graceful, mysterious meditation on our unquenchable search for human connection…Almodovar's ‘All About My Mother’ won an Oscar as Best Foreign-Language Film of 2000. I say, forget the language and put ‘Talk to Her’ in the proper category--Best Film of 2002." --Guy Flatley, Moviecrazed

"Spellbound by the cinema's unique abilities to loop and layer narrative and to convey feelings with color, light, movement, time-shifting, and even silence, the director uses those materials here with exuberant adoration and maturity...The performances, especially by Spanish actor Cámara as the instinctively generous Benigno--a very human man aware of his own loneliness--are so lived-in as to feel inevitable...It's funny, tender, a little shocking, and it pays homage to what we know about movies: that they can move us beyond words." -- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly