Palo Alto Independent Films Group

Show time: 5:45 PM; Meet on the upper lobby by the windows around 5:30 PM, or look for us in the theater. (It's one of the small ones.)

Join us for Pedro Almodóvar's first English language film, and first to win a major European festival award: the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Two, old friends (Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore), separated by life, reunite as one faces a sentence of terminal cancer, and asks her friend to be in the next room when she decides to end her life.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw wrote in his rave review: "...as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything Almodóvar has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton."

If you'd like to have dinner and chat after the film, gather by the windows on the upper lobby after the show, and we'll go somewhere on the plaza.

Show time: 3:15 PM; Meet in the lobby around 3:00 PM.

THE BRUTALIST tells the story of visionary architect László Toth who arrives in America after the War, to rebuild his life, his work, and his marriage after being forced apart during wartime. On his own in a strange new country, László settles in Pennsylvania, where the wealthy and prominent industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren recognizes his talent for building.

The film is three and a half hours long, but does include a 15 minute intermission!

Reviewing it at the Venice Film Festival, The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw wrote: "This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape."

Gather in the lobby after the show if you'd like to get something to eat and discuss the film.