All About My Mother is one of Almodóvar's most gentle films - despite the melodrama, despite the histrionics, there is a casualness to the film that is simply a delight to behold.

Almodóvar pulls off a nice trick with this movie, moving his protagonist and us from despair to a new lease on life with an ease that feels magical.

Perhaps the director’s most restrained effort yet.

Following his relatively tame, Academy Award-nominated international breakthrough, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pedro Almodóvar went back to his more customary territory of sex and violence for Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Despite the fact that it was instrumental in introducing the NC-17 rating to the US, it managed to gross a cool four mil in …

[xrr rating=3.5/5]Pedro Almodóvar rose up during la movida madrileña, a short period between the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 and the appearance of AIDS where Spain experienced a cultural awakening as the shackles of fascism sloughed away, allowing the Spanish to finally experiment with sex and drugs. While Almodóvar has evolved into a “serious” filmmaker with each new …

Five years is an eternity in the life of a film. When coming up with this feature, the question the Spectrum Culture staff pondered was this: “How well do these movies play NOW!” Not five years ago, but how have they aged in our memories. While some acclaimed films of ’06 remain strong on our list, some critically-lauded ones didn’t …

The Skin I Live In Dir: Pedro Almodóvar Rating: 4.5/5.0 Sony Pictures Classics 117 Minutes In The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodóvar unleashes his most audacious, unforgettable statement on one of his career’s central themes: female subjectivity. We now properly understand the director’s penchant for narrative twists and turns: in the way that Almodóvar carves up his stories like …

We at Spectrum Culture strive to bring you only the best. Ten auteurs at the forefront of the world stage: these are the Best Living Directors. Pedro Almodóvar is too daring a director to consistently crank out unassailably great movies. He is continually pushing at his own boundaries, setting up expectations only to subvert them as quickly and ruthlessly as …

Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director. Pedro Almodóvar’s features have always been self-referential, commenting both on themselves and the benchmark influences their director continually trots out. Volver took this process one step further, resurrecting a character’s stolen manuscript from 1995’s The Flower of My Secret and turning it into its own …

Oeuvre is an in-depth examination of the entire body of work of an important director. There aren’t many filmmakers who can match Pedro Almodóvar’s ability to speak the language of cinema. Even amongst those who are unarguably fluent, be it Quentin Tarantino’s pidgin-like appropriation of junk genres or Todd Haynes’ chameleon-like ability to seamlessly jump between styles, Almodóvar uses cinema …