FULL SPOILER-FREE REVIEW @ https://www.msbreviews.com/movie-reviews/parallel-mothers-spoiler-free-review "Parallel Mothers holds an unexpectedly shocking narrative about motherhood, featuring two remarkable performances from Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit. Despite some dull soap-opera moments and a few uninspiring technical attributes, Pedro Almodóvar offers a captivating, genuine, emotionally powerful story…

Parallel Mothers bespeaks a creative fatigue on the part of writer/director Pedro Almodóvar. Not only is it too similar to his very uneven Julieta from just six years ago, but also rather hard to take seriously – and there is no reason that we should have to or even that he would want us to; the Switched at Birth trope is the stuff of soap operas, and that’s precisely why it would work wonderfully, as that sort of…

Parallel Mothers: Ghosts That Won't Be Buried Pedro Almodóvar has always had something to say, but "Parallel Mothers" may be his most ambitious statement to date. This is a film that operates on multiple registers simultaneously: a motherhood story wrapped inside a love triangle wrapped inside a political warning so urgent it reverberates far beyond Spain's borders. The story of mothers and babies here is no…