It’s accomplished with Mr. Almodóvar’s usual impeccable taste in design and flair for melodrama, and boasts one of the finest scores of his longtime collaborator Alberto Iglesias’s career.

But by leaning so hard into self-critique, Almodóvar sometimes forgets the element that makes his best films so invigorating to watch: Passion.

A fair amount of folks are dismissing this as Minor Pedro, and for much of its running it seems to be, entertainingly so. But I see a master at dusk, spinning the expanding, empathetic tales he knows will be his last.

There is no conceivable scenario in which Bitter Christmas should be seen as anything close to a minor film by Almodóvar. It is instead the work of a filmmaker who refuses to stoop below his own standards in the "twilight" of his career.