Pain and Glory - 2 nominations

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role - Antonio Banderas

Best International Feature Film - Spain

Pain and Glory is an exquisite film about a famous movie director who recalls the key moments of his life, those that shaped everything he knows about himself in the present day.  Antonio Banderas is nominated for playing Salvador Mallo, the man who is about to celebrate a significant anniversary for his most enduring film, SABOR.  (This is inexplicably the first Oscars nomination for Banderas.) This means reconnecting with the wild lead actor, a man with whom he had a terrible falling out, who turns Mallo onto the "wonderful world" of heroin addiction.  All the while, he is suffering from a series of very serious ailments, including chronic and severe back pain.  Alone and depressed, he thinks about the history of his life, when he began to discover his homosexuality, what his life was like with an absent father and living in an underground cave as an apartment, and all of the key moments in his autobiography, happy and sad.

The film is more than a character study, it's touching, it's engaging, and Banderas is magnetic. We feel his pain inside our own bodies; both the physical and the emotional.

Almodovar's films are powerful, and I have yet to see one I haven't liked.  Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is wonderful, but for today I'll recommend Talk to Her for which Almodovar won an Oscar for Original Screenplay.  All About My Mother is another of Almodovar's films to have been nominated for the International Feature award, which it won in 1999. When you have finished that film... just watch everything he's made.  I'm a fan.

Watch the trailer: