After years marked by cold feet and false starts, the great Pedro Almodóvar made his English-language debut with 2020’s “The Human Voice.” The Spanish filmmaker started off easy, adapting a Jean Cocteau one-act into a 30-minute monologue delivered by Tilda Swinton — and the film was a charmer, breaking out of that year’s COVID-defiant Venice Film Festival, where it united a deeply improbable, socially distanced event.
The filmmaker more than doubled the number of speaking roles for his next short, “Strange Way of Life,” and now, four decades into his career, Almodóvar returns to Venice to premiere his long-awaited U.S.-set feature (which, of course, he mostly shot in Spain).