In the first few minutes of The Room Next Door, director Pedro Almodóvar’s first English feature,, author Ingrid ( Julianne Moore) is signing books at Manhattan’s ritzy Rizzoli Bookstore when a reader prompts, “In the prologue, you say you wrote this book in order to better understand and accept death.”

Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore star in the Spanish director’s first English-language feature, following two old friends as one is dying of cancer.

Cast against type, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton excel as old colleagues who get back in touch after a cancer diagnosis spurs them to take a morbid getaway.

Pedro Almodóvar's first English-language film, The Room Next Door, is a meditation on death. Writing and making movies "is a way of running away from death," the Spanish director says.

Films that are straightforwardly about death are rare, but movies that are about both death and sex are rarer, still.