(fuller review TK). Real-world cinema, in this case from Iran: no special effects, no histrionics, just real people facing real situations, making choices that the viewer can admire or criticize. In other words, we are drawn into director TK’s vision and made to question our own feelings and reactions. Here, notably, we admire the lead male for his sensitivity, forbearance, skill with his pupils and ability to hold it all together; while we lose sympathy with his wife, despite her rape, as she is unable to move on and stop burdening those around her. And then our sympathies shift. For every character we see the good and the bad. And we recognize that here, as in life, there is no black and white, only many shades of grey that blend into one another, for better and worse.

If not the worst movie of the year, it will take something to beat it. I had read it was that rare thing, a German comedy. We waited 85 minutes for the comedy, but by then the characters were so unpleasant to watch that we gave up. The lead woman was not just unhappy below the surface, she was a mess above. The lead man was supposedly the comic character, but his eccentricity was never explained, nor was his presence in the Bucharest scenes, and you just felt sorry for him when not squirming at the awkwardness of it all. The secondary characters were no better – not a recognizable human person among them – and the business situations were equally caricatured. Finally, the hand-held camerawork was unnecessarily annoying. In short, I can’t think of one redeeming aspect, although we did miss the final 80 minutes.

No director working today portrays women as well and as beautifully as the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. Penelope Cruz has been perhaps his most famous muse (in five Almodovar films), but in Julieta he works with Emma Suarez and Adriana Ugarte (the young Julieta) to stunning effect. One or the other is almost always on screen, framed artistically, with blond hair that denotes their age or their psychological condition. Based, somehow, on three stories by Alice Munro, the plot is never frothy, nor so melodramatic that you lose touch with the reality of the people and their feelings, albeit little that is recounted is personally familiar. By going back and forth between the two characters – Julieta is writing her daughter about her past – we never tire of either one, and long to see how engagingly beautiful Almodovar will make her next. The ending lacked conviction and left me hanging, but life doesn’t neatly wrap itself up, either.

There’s nothing wrong with making a feel-good movie, in which 37 consecutive scenes end with a moment that brings a smile or a tear, in which every child is perfectly behaved, in which every injustice is overcome, in which even the allegedly hard-hearted gruff boss is played by Kevin Costner. Nothing wrong, but you might as well be watching a fairy tale, instead of a supposedly true-life story about America’s space program. Then again, most fairy tales have more suspense and produce more dread that something might go wrong. See Loving for a more realistic picture of life in Virginia in 1961.