‘The Room Next Door’ Review: Tilda Swinton Gives a Monumental Performance as a Woman Confronting Death in Pedro Almodóvar’s First English-Language Drama

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Characters die in movies every day. Whether you’re watching a violent thriller or a death-bed tearjerker like “Steel Magnolias” or some of the more macabre meditations of Ingmar Bergman, you might say that the movies, in some grand collective way, are nothing less than a rehearsal for death.

Yet it’s still rare to encounter a big-screen drama that grabs death by the horns, that looks it in the eye, that asks us to confront its daunting reality on every level the way Pedro Almodóvar’s lyrical and moving “The Room Next Door” does.

The movie, in form, is quite simple. It’s about two women, both in their early 60s, who’ve been friends for a long time but haven’t seen each other in years: Ingrid (Julianne Moore), an art-world author based in New York City, and Martha (Tilda Swinton), a former globe-trotting war correspondent for the New York Times who Ingrid reconnects with when she learns that Martha is in the hospital fighting a battle with cancer.

Her illness is serious: It’s stage-three cervical cancer, and she’s undergoing a highly experimental immunotherapy treatment, which is the only chance she has. (In other words, not much of one.) Some people in this situation might not choose to vent their feelings, but Martha isn’t like that.