The new movie by Pedro Almodóvar connects with Pain and Glory (2019) in its autobiographical inspiration. We find ourselves once again with a film featuring a director as the protagonist, although here in a dual role. Barbara Lennie She embodies Elsa, a cult filmmaker, a migraine sufferer, and haunted by her mother's death. This character, in a story within a story, is at the heart of a new screenplay being written by a filmmaker named Raúl, played by Leonardo Sbaraglia. In the film's first part, Almodóvar revels in his familiar imagery without injecting any new energy, and doubts arise from the images. Is the director from La Mancha aware that the reflection of himself shown to us by Elsa and Raúl isn't particularly flattering? Could there be a touch of artifice in his insistence on making Chavela Vargas a trigger for emotion? How is it that the best sequence in this segment is a striptease The male lead, directed by Patrick Criado, reminds us of Almodóvar's torrid early work? And is he clear that he's portraying his partner first as a pure object of desire and then (in the skin of Quim Gutiérrez) as a mere caregiver?

Dialogue is a humanities and spirituality magazine that, as its editors describe, "highlights the diversity of religious beliefs and the roots of all of them in this corner of the world that is Catalonia." My favorite section is the Spiritual guide of Catalonia, signed by the writer, journalist, translator and editor Anna Punsoda (and also director of the magazine for a year): a series of chronicles written after spending a couple of days in oratories, monasteries or retreat houses, which will end up being a book by Fragmenta and which will delight everyone who has read her magnificent guide to the Segarra, The hard earth, published in Pòrtic in 2024. So far, two have been published: that of the Montserrat monastery (warning that if you read it you will end with a crush with its abbess) and that of Casa Virupa, the Mediterranean Buddhist center in Llinars del Vallès. Here, Punsoda learns the Four Noble Truths enunciated by Buddha: that living involves dissatisfaction (illness, aging, loss, death); that the cause of this is desire or attachment (to pleasure, ideas, ego); that by ridding ourselves of attachment we can extinguish dissatisfaction; and that the Eightfold Path is the way to achieve it (understanding, intention, word, action, way of life, effort, mindfulness, and concentration).