In a New Yorker review, Justin Chang calls Pedro Almodóvar's 'Bitter Christmas,' his twenty-fourth feature, a dizzyingly intricate meditation on the artist's compulsion to spin truth into fiction, giving Almodóvar two alter egos: Elsa, a director who is a character in the script Raúl is writing, and Raúl himself. Chang reads the film as confessional, following Elsa's romance with Bonifacio, a firefighter who strips on weekends, and framing the ugly side of friendship as its bitterness.