National School's Film Week 2010

I’m pleased to be taking part in National Schools Film Week again this year, which is happening in cinemas in Glasgow and Edinburgh from 28 October-5 November. The programme offers free cinema screenings for school classes, during school hours, featuring a huge range of films, from this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker to Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel, and everything you can imagine inbetween.

The idea of National Schools Film Week is to inspire pupils by opening them up to films they might not usually choose to watch, as well as equipping teachers by offering them new ways of approaching familiar subjects through film. They get industry professionals and film critics to come and talk before or after screenings; this year I’ll be introducing the Edinburgh screening of Pedro Almodovar’s most recent film, Broken Embraces (pictured).

This year Film Education will be supplementing its usual advice to schools with a special Not Just A Trip To The Movies guide at www.filmeducation.org packed with tips for teachers suggesting the broad range of ways in which they and their students might make the most of a NSFW (an unfortunate abbreviation, but it's the one they're sticking with) screening, before, during and afterwards.

Booking is open now for over 50 screenings in Glasgow and Edinburgh through the week, and you can find out more at www.nsfw.org.

Broken Embraces

Broken Embraces has everything that an Almodovar fan could hope for. It is a story about filmmaking that celebrates the triumphs and tragedies of storytelling: multi-stranded narratives unfold within other stories; seemingly unrelated characters are slowly revealed to be linked by deep secrets, and all the while Almodovar’s camera prowls with Hitchcockian precision, lapping up the beautifully designed sets and the equally beautiful performances of the cast (Lluis Homar and Penelope Cruz in particular). For all of its pleasures though, Broken Embraces feels too much like Spain’s greatest living director on autopilot. After the career high of Volver, which was so tightly constructed and emotionally resonant, Broken Embraces lacks focus, with perhaps too many storylines spiralling all over the place, and none of them gripping enough to really move an audience.

Make no mistake, a new Almodovar is always going to be essential viewing, and Broken Embraces offers many moments that can sit alongside his best work - a confrontation scene with Cruz mimicking her own image on a screen is stunning. But the overall sensation is as if Almodovar had laid on a delicious spread of sweet desserts, when what I really wanted was the full three courses.