Pedro Almodóvar will introduce a UK preview of Bitter Christmas at the Barbican’s Outdoor Cinema on Tuesday 18 August, a full ten days before the film goes on general release.
When we ran through the Barbican’s Outdoor Cinema line-up last month, we called it a programme built like a festival rather than a summer sideline. It turns out the Barbican wasn’t quite finished. Pedro Almodóvar is joining the bill in person, and he’s bringing a film that hasn’t opened anywhere in the UK yet.
The addition pushes the series’ opening night forward to Tuesday 18 August, a day earlier than the dates we originally covered. Almodóvar will take to the Sculpture Court himself to introduce Bitter Christmas ahead of its UK general release on 28 August, making this the only chance to see it in London before then.
The story: two timelines, one filmmaker’s guilt
Bitter Christmas premiered in Competition at Cannes this year, and it is as knotty as anything Almodóvar has made. Leonardo Sbaraglia plays Raúl, a cult filmmaker mid creative crisis, who starts drawing on the real people around him after tragedy strikes a close collaborator. Bárbara Lennie plays Elsa, a filmmaker he imagines writing a script whose story gradually turns out to be his own. The two narratives fold into each other until the line between autofiction and exploitation gets genuinely hard to see. Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Victoria Luengo, Patrick Criado, Milena Smit and Quim Gutiérrez complete the cast.
The London x London Take: Book this one before the rest of the series. It is the priciest night of the run by some distance, and the only one where the director is standing in front of the screen rather than just behind the camera. Almodóvar in person, under the Barbican’s night sky, in a film Londoners won’t be able to see anywhere else for another ten days: that is a very different proposition to a rerun of Arrival, however good the rest of the programme is. Tickets have been on general sale since 9 July, so this is not one to leave until the week itself.
Need to Know
- Venue: Barbican Sculpture Court, Barbican Centre
- Address: Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS
- Date: Tuesday 18 August 2026, 8.30pm
