The latest award-winning film from the fantastic Spanish director, Pedro Alodovar, continues his present trend of downplaying the comedy and sex of his earlier films and playing the melodrama straight – well, almost straight. In this film, Cruz plays Raimunda, a woman trying to support her wayward husband and teenage daughter, who gets some unexpected assistance from the playful ghost of her dead mother. An extremely charming paean to female power and the strength of family.

TALK TO HER explores themes of hope, faith, friendship and unexpected love from the perspective of two men who meet in a hospital where their lovers lie in comas. Marco is a reporter whose bullfighting girlfriend has recently been gored by a bull. Benigno is a nurse whose only patient is a young ballerina who has been in a coma for four years. He is in love with her but they have never met. Almodovar is not blind to the slightly kinky nature of these relationships, but he also knows about the unpredictability of love and life.

• Read the Brattle Theatre Film Notes for TALK TO HER

"A delirious, headlong immersion and re-invention of film noir, a style that has lured countless film makers onto its treacherous shoals. Mr. Almodovar, unlike other filmmakers who lose their bearings, fully understands the degree to which the genre is synonymous with fantasy and a primal longing for the forbidden. The coup de grace of BAD EDUCATION, which ricochets back and forth between 1964 and 1980, with a finale set mostly in 1977, is that here the femme fatale is a predatory transsexual named Ignacio. Once a beautiful boy soprano, he/she was abused by a priest, the principal in his Catholic boys school. As the film deepens and the characters' mistaken and multiple identities accumulate, the priest returns from the past in a new, desperate guise. BAD EDUCATION contemplates the wonder of storytelling itself and the human instinct to embroider reality to make the tales we tell more real and conclusive, if less strictly factual. It insists that stories, the stories within stories, and the fantasies they crystallize, are the best (and maybe the only) tools at our disposal for making sense of it all.” – Stephen Holden, The New York Times

This brilliant film was the deserving winner of the Best Foreign Film award at the 2000 Academy Awards. It tells the story of a woman’s transformation after the death of her son, of her journey back in time to face the ghosts of her past, and her search for outlets for her mothering instincts. ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is the first of Almodovar’s recent films to really exhibit his refinement as a director. So distinct from his earlier films that it clearly signifies a new era in his directing and writing.

The breakthrough, international hit that truly launched Almodovar into the spotlight, WOMEN ON THE VERGE is a terrific farce about love, loss, secrets and the adverse affects of a big batch of spiked gazpacho.

When he is sent to prison, Victor (Rabal) unknowingly becomes a catalyst for a young cop (Bardem), the seasoned partner, his philandering wife, and the diplomat’s daughter who put him there. Years later he emerges, still young, to discover their lives transformed while his has grown stagnant. Haunted by anger, Victor seeks revenge. A typically tragic-comic tale of revenge, redemption, hope and the ways of fate from Almodovar.

Paredes is terrific in this portrait of a successful romance writer on the verge of a breakdown. With a mostly absent military-man husband and a stagnant career weighing on her back, she’ll try anything to change her life. Prime Douglas Sirk tribute by the modern master of melodrama.

Almodovar’s early formula has always been pretty obvious: take the melodrama of Douglas Sirk, pump up the camp, sex and comedy and come up with some of the freshest filmmaking of the past quarter century. The Almodovar formula is in full force as this tale of the life and loves of Pablo, a successful film director, which swings from crime thriller to romance to X-rated soap opera. Considered by many to be the pinnacle of early Almodovar, don’t miss this rare screening!

A young and hunky Antonio Banderas co-stars in this insistently raffish, blackly humorous, surrealist sex comedy about the impossibility of love between two people obsessed with killing – and the innocent man stuck in the middle.