Tetro – 6.5

Francis Ford Coppola channels Almodovar, but doesn’t quite capture the magic. The setting in La Boca in Buenos Aires is wonderful, as is the Penelope Cruz stand-in, Maribel Verdu. In fact, the black-and-white triangle of Verdu, the young Bennie, and the overly intense Vincent Gallo is the movie’s Pinteresque strength. The flashbacks in contrasting color are less satisfactory: they tease us with partial disclosures, in a way that makes no sense, unless you grant Coppola a magic realism license because of his film’s locale. By the end, the movie had dragged on too long, and traded in its early, eerie power for sitcom-level melodrama.