The Room Next Door review – Almodóvar’s English-language debut is extravagant and engrossing

Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton give luxuriously self-aware performances as two old friends who are reunited in a doggedly mysterious drama

Peter Bradshaw

Wed 23 Oct 2024 07.00 BST

When this film won the Golden Lion for Pedro Almodóvar at the Venice film festival this summer, there were three kinds of surprised critic. Some were surprised to learn that this was Almodóvar’s first ever major European festival award; others that this should be the film to finally bag it … and then there were those who were politely surprised that it should have won anything at all. I myself found it as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything he has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and an undertow of darkness often overlooked by yeasayers and naysayers.

Tilda Swinton, Demi Moore, Julia Moore and Nicole KidmanSwinton and Moore: Courtesy Toronto International Film Festival; Moore: Chad Salvador—Variety/Getty Images; Kidman: Niko Tavernise—A24

While Brad Pitt and George Clooney Settle Into Silver-Fox Charm, Their Female Peers Are the True Stars of the Season

BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

20 September 2924

The pleasures of writer-director Jon Watts’ crime caper Wolfs are numerous: George Clooney and Brad Pitt play dueling fixers called in to clean up the accidental death of a young, adorable student—prior to his demise, occasioned by his jumping on a hotel bed, he’d been picked up by high-powered district attorney Amy Ryan in a bar. Clooney and Pitt have reached the age where they know it’s useless to pretend they’re something they’re not. Their faces look handsomely lived in; the whispers of gray in their artfully sculpted chin stubble feel honest and earned. Like Lucy and Ethel in the throes of a falling out, they’re fun to watch as they bicker and crab at one another, leaning heavily on their silver-fox charm. Still, what they’re offering feels as comfy as the worn-in leather jackets they wear. And in this late-2024 movie season, if you find yourself wishing for something more—for another view of what actors in the 50-to-60-ish age bracket can do—look to the women, who insist on pushing themselves out of the comfort zone rather than settling into it.

Demi Moore in Coralie Fargeat’s horror-of-aging black comedy The Substance, Nicole Kidman in Halina Reijn’s May-December sizzler Babygirl,Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s moving and provocative The Room Next Door: These big-name movie stars are pushing into new territory rather than just riffing on whatever may have made them appealing 10, 20, or 30 years ago. That’s a luxury no actress can afford, and these women know it.

 

Tilda Swinton, Pedro Almodóvar and Julianne Moore

Venice film festival 2024

Are standing ovations at film festivals getting out of hand?

The Venice premiere of Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door received 17 minutes of applause – has touting the length of clapping has become just another PR tool?

Logia de Guy

Wednesday 4 September 2024

For any film lovers who aren’t currently at the Venice film festival and want to play along at home, here’s something to try. Pop in a DVD of your favourite Pedro Almodóvar film – or your least favourite, or one you think is merely OK, since it makes little difference for this exercise. Watch the film through and, as the closing credits begin to roll, set the stopwatch on your phone, rise to your feet and start clapping. Keep clapping until your hands are sore, your feet are sore, or you simply get bored – whichever comes first. Pause the stopwatch and see how long you made it. A minute? Two if you were really stretching yourself?

Tilda Swinton in The Gentlewomen

 

Tilda Swinton

Text by Penny Martin
Portraits by Benjamin Alexander Huseby
Styling by Jonathan Kaye

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Issue n° 5, Spring & Summer 2012

The next time you see Tilda Swinton, it will be in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, a story of love and revelation set in 1960s New England. And if the phenomenal, Oscar-winning Scottish actress has her way, it may be her last movie for quite a while. 

Tilda Swinton: collaborative chameleon who doesn't court Hollywood

Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton: collaborative chameleon who doesn't court Hollywood

She feels like a tourist in Hollywood and apologises for not being ‘a proper actor’, but that doesn’t stop her landing big roles and winning Oscars

Emine Saner

Friday 24 July 2015

I

t tells you a lot about Tilda Swinton that the transformation which has rendered her unrecognisable is the one in which she appears most conventional.

In the forthcoming comedy Trainwreck, Swinton plays a monstrous magazine editor, Dianna, and pictures released this week show her looking far from the Swinton – all shorn hair, pale scrubbed face and architectural clothing – we have come to expect. Dianna has blow-dried, highlighted hair, nice makeup and a tan, which has prompted some to note that Swinton, who has played men, robots and an octogenarian, has “never been more disguised”.

Posters / Suspiria / 2018

Posters

SUSPIRIA

(2018)

Directed by Luca Guadagnino

Starring by Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Grace Moretz, Mia Goth

Illustration by Konstantin Kakanias

 

Tilda Swinton, Olivier Saillard and the Art of Dressing

Alexandria Symonds

November 24, 2015

Over the last few years, Tilda Swinton has collaborated with the fashion curator Olivier Saillard on three rather unusual live performances, now documented in a catalog called ‘‘Impossible Wardrobes.’’ In one piece, Saillard and Swinton made a dress to measure, with Swinton as a dress form. For another, the actress painstakingly carried historically significant items of clothing, like Napoleon’s coat, down a runway. ‘‘In many ways,’’ she explains, ‘‘the clothes operated as a bridge to the person no longer inside them — almost as if the garment is a symptom or a leaf shed from a tree.’’ In the final work, Swinton assumed the role of coat-check attendant, leaving bits of personal ephemera, like a drop of perfume or a lipstick-smeared tissue, in visitors’ pockets. ‘‘I still prize the old shoes and tiny cardigans of my now sky-scraping children,’’ Swinton says. ‘‘They link to the past like portals.’’

THE NEW YORK TIMES

• 
  
  
  
• DE OTROS MUNDOS
• Tilda Swinton, la nueva pareja de David Bowie
• Tilda Swinton enarbola la bandera arco iris frente al Kremlim
• Tilda Swinton, la reina de las transformaciones
• Tilda Swinton: “No hay nada mejor que llevar la contraria”
• Tilda Swinton filtra sus ‘emails’ para zanjar una discusión racial
• Brad Pitt y su novia no son los únicos / Otras parejas que mantienen una relación abierta
• Posters / Suspiria / 2018
• Tilda Swinton según Tim Walker
• ‘Suspiria’, un clásico del terror en los tiempos del #MeToo
• Las mil y una caras de Tilda Swinton
• Tilda Swinton / Desde que lo conocí en los años ochenta, he venerado a Almodóvar

DRAGON

Look of the Moment / Tilda Swinton

The Seanson in Quincy / Four Portraits by John Berger

Hung in Time / John Berger draws Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton,Olivier Saillard and the Art of Dressing

DANTE

Tilda Swinton / «Sono una strega, come vorrebbe esserlo ogni donna»

Tilda Swinton / Championing talent, regardless of gender

 

Tilda Swinton at the Venice film festival for the premiere of The Human Voice

Tilda Swinton: championing talent, regardless of gender

The star was the first to welcome the abolition of male and female awards at the Berlin film festival

Rebecca Nicholson
Saturday 15 September 2020

I

t is rare that a move being described as “eminently sensible” is newsworthy; still, at the Venice film festival last week, this is how Tilda Swinton referred to the fact that the Berlin film festival will no longer be handing out acting awards by gender.

“I think it’s pretty much inevitable that everybody will follow. It’s just obvious to me,” she said. Cate Blanchett also expressed her support, explaining that she prefers to be known as an actor. “I am of the generation where the word actress was used almost always in a pejorative sense. So I claim the other space,” she said.

Take it from me, little occasions as much commenter wrath as following this publication’s style guide and referring to a woman who acts as an “actor”. The notion of rewarding good performance by performance alone already exists for some award shows and, as Swinton says, it is inevitable that more will follow.

Splitting acting categories into two genders, and only acting categories, is something that makes less sense the more you think about it, like saying a word over and over again, until it no longer sounds like a word. Extend it to any other category – best costume (male), best sound design (female) etc – and it is anachronistic and strange. And as the non-binary actor Asia Kate Dillon, star of Billions, asked the Emmys in 2017: “If the categories of ‘actor’ and ‘actress’ are meant to denote assigned sex I ask, respectfully, why is that necessary?”

Some say that without splitting awards by gender, women would be underrepresented, as they are in, say, best director, a category that is usually all-male, regardless of who is making films that year. But that argument is unconvincing, half-hearted, and it no longer feels good enough.

I love awards ceremonies so much that I feel real fury when a deserving winner is robbed, yet it seems to me that the only downside would be cutting the number of acting awards, and therefore acceptance speeches, in half. While I am here for equality, I am not here for being deprived of the opportunity to decide whether tears are real or to spot those “accidental” omissions from the thank-yous.

On the other hand, nobody who wasn’t stuck right there in the room has ever watched the entirety of the Grammys. Abolish gendered categories and we can zip through everything in an hour, argue about the winners for a bit, then go home and have an early night. An eminently sensible suggestion.

THE GUARDIAN

Hung in Time /John Berger draws Tilda Swinton

Hung in Time: John Berger draws Tilda Swinton

DE OTROS MUNDOS

Tumbas / Borges

Autores británicos que devorar

John Berger / Conversación

John Berger / El cuaderno de Bento

John Berger / El silencio no miente

DRAGON

John Berger / Quotes

John Berger / A life in quotes

The Seasons in Quincy / Four Portraits of John Berger

Hung in Time /John Berger draws Tilda Swinton

The Seasons in Quincy / Four Portraits of John Berger

John Berger and Tilda Swinton during the making of The Seasons
in Quincy, a documentary about Berger released in 2016. Photograph: PR

The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger

DE OTROS MUNDOS

Tumbas / Borges

Autores británicos que devorar

John Berger / Conversación

John Berger / El cuaderno de Bento

John Berger / El silencio no miente

DRAGON

John Berger / Quotes

John Berger / A life in quotes

The Seasons in Quincy / Four Portraits of John Berger

Hung in Time /John Berger draws Tilda Swinton

Look of the Moment / Tilda Swinton

Look of the Moment | Tilda Swinton

WOMEN'S FASHION

By EDWARD BARSAMIAN

 NOVEMBER 14, 2011, 1:31 PM

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

The Look: Icy. A crisply tailored satin and silk tuxedo in slightly off shades of shimmery ivory and winter white looks terrifically slick and smart.

The Girl: The actress Tilda Swinton at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ third annual Governors Awards in Hollywood.

The Details: Haider Ackermann tuxedo and blouse.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/look-of-the-moment/page/5/

• 
  
  
  
• DE OTROS MUNDOS
• Tilda Swinton, la nueva pareja de David Bowie
• Tilda Swinton enarbola la bandera arco iris frente al Kremlim
• Tilda Swinton, la reina de las transformaciones
• Tilda Swinton: “No hay nada mejor que llevar la contraria”
• Tilda Swinton filtra sus ‘emails’ para zanjar una discusión racial
• Brad Pitt y su novia no son los únicos / Otras parejas que mantienen una relación abierta
• Posters / Suspiria / 2018
• Tilda Swinton según Tim Walker
• ‘Suspiria’, un clásico del terror en los tiempos del #MeToo
• Las mil y una caras de Tilda Swinton
• Tilda Swinton / Desde que lo conocí en los años ochenta, he venerado a Almodóvar

DRAGON

Look of the Moment / Tilda Swinton

The Seanson in Quincy / Four Portraits by John Berger

Hung in Time / John Berger draws Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton,Olivier Saillard and the Art of Dressing

DANTE

Tilda Swinton / «Sono una strega, come vorrebbe esserlo ogni donna»