Bitter Christmas Opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 13

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Bitter Christmas opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 13, with Sony Pictures Classics scheduling a wider US release for November 25. Pedro Almodóvar wrote and directed the Spanish-language film. Its official US trailer identifies two periods: the story of an advertising director named Elsa in 2004 and the story of a writer-director named Raúl in 2026. The distributor describes a connection between the two. Raúl is writing about Elsa, and the life he puts on the page is the subject of the film as much as his need to write it.

Stories about writers often make the completed work the reward for a character’s struggle. The interesting thing about this setup is that a completed script might create a problem instead. Raúl can decide when a scene starts, whose reaction closes it and which detail becomes a recurring motif. Elsa, if she is seen through that script, cannot necessarily decide what any of it means. The possibility that a work can be beautiful and unfair to someone at the same time is a better hook for Bitter Christmas than the chance to guess which details belong to Almodóvar himself.

Elsa is allowed to have her own December

Spain’s Ministry of Culture describes Elsa retreating into work after her mother dies during a long December holiday. She later goes to Lanzarote with her friend Patricia. The ministry lists the film at 111 minutes and records its Cannes competition selection. Sony Pictures Classics named Bárbara Lennie and Leonardo Sbaraglia among the cast when it announced the North American acquisition in 2025. Its account also places the film in a long relationship with the director and his producer Agustín Almodóvar, rather than presenting the US opening as a new acquisition.

The trip suggests an immediate drama that can stand on its own. A person who has filled the hours with work may still have to decide how to spend a morning when the work is absent. A friendship can change simply because two people want incompatible things from the same escape. Those are human questions before they are clues to Raúl’s method. If Elsa’s strand keeps the unpredictability of ordinary behavior, the later revelation of a storyteller can make her scenes more charged. It need not reduce them to a demonstration of how clever he is.

From festivals to a US audience

AFI FEST programmed Bitter Christmas for a special screening on October 24 and lists Pau Esteve Birba as cinematographer, Teresa Font as editor and Alberto Iglesias as composer. The November dates concern public theatrical distribution after that festival appearance. They are US dates. The words New York and Los Angeles matter this week because the first opening does not put the film in cinemas everywhere at once. The distributor’s November 25 date is the point to look for a broader rollout, with individual screenings still determined locally.

An editor can use the distance between 2004 and 2026 to do more than provide a puzzle with an answer. Put the aftermath of a small embarrassment beside a polished version of it and the cut can expose what the writer has left out. Carry a color or a piece of music across those years and it can suggest a feeling the writer has kept even if the facts have shifted. Those possibilities are why the credits and the structure matter together. The ethical question belongs to the form of the film as much as to anything its writer character might say.

The version of this premise I most want to see is one in which we are tempted to side with the storyteller. It is easy to disapprove of an obvious theft. It is harder to recognize the cost of an image that moves us because it simplifies someone else’s life. The public trailer makes clear that fiction and experience will rub against each other. What the opening now offers is the chance to watch the film decide how much room the people who inspired a story get to refuse its conclusions.