Pain and Glory poster

Pain and Glory (2019)

Film · 1h 54m · Rated R · In Spanish

Drama, Foreign (non-English)

A filmmaker intimately reflects on his life's loves and losses, feeling a nostalgic melancholy in his twilight years.

Intimate and earnest. A full-attention watch at a measured pace. Emotionally it is heavy.

Not on a US subscription service as of Oct 28, 2026.

Pain and Glory parents guide

Moderate sex and nudity, and no real violence, about what an R should carry.

Scare
Not scary
Jump scares
None noted
Gore
No gore
Violence
No real violence
Sex and nudity
Moderate
Moderate means a sex scene or nudity on screen, even brief, or sexual violence that is described or implied but never shown.
Language
Mild
Mild words like damn, hell or crap.

How we rate: an AI reads what is known about each title and tags it 0 to 3; we check the tags against a hand-rated set and correct them by hand when readers tell us. Estimates, not a scene-by-scene review. Spot a mistake? Tell us.

What is Pain and Glory about?

Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.

Does it have a happy ending? (spoiler-safe)

Bittersweet. It earns its ending, but not everyone gets what they want.

Cast and crew

Directed byPedro Almodóvar
StarringAntonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Nora Navas, Julieta Serrano, Penélope Cruz

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Pain and Glory is on our LGBTQ+ and Spanish-language lists.

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Lists with the same feel: Melancholy.

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Uses the TMDB API; not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Intensity, content, tone and pace tags are CouchRot's own.