(Spain) Box set of eight films from Pedro Almodovar, Spain's dynamic director of screwball melodramas, hot-blooded thrillers, and tender dramas of women's relationships. The darker side of his sensibility is on display in the earliest films in the collection: Matador (1986), a strangely erotic story about lovers who find sexual fulfillment in murder (with appropriate quotes from Duel in the Sun), and Law of Desire (1987), a passionately overblown romantic tragic-comedy turned murder ballad, Almodovar style. Carmen Maura and Antonia Banderas are featured in both of these, but they rose to international prominence (along with Almodovar) in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), his hit screwball farce with a feminist slant. Almodovar drives this romantic cocktail at a mambo pace and crams it full of ridiculous plot twists, bizarre coincidences, and giddily gauche decor, but the daffy and delightful Carmen Maura holds it together as she looks for love in the craziest places. Marisa Paredes plays a popular romance novelist with aspirations to "serious" writing in The Flower of My Secret (1995), which you could describe as a mature look at a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Live Flesh (1997), a revenge thriller based on a novel by Ruth Rendell, is thriller that teeters on the edge of lurid sexploitation but emerges a sensitive essay of jealousy, need, passion, and love. All About My Mother (1999), a tender drama of a single mother (Cecilia Roth) in search of the father of her son after he is killed in a car accident, is considered by many Almodovar's masterpiece. He won the Oscar for best screenplay for Talk to Her (2002), starring Javier Cámara and Darío Grandinetti as two men who become unlikely friends while awaiting patiently for the women they love (Rosario Flores and Leonor Watling, respectively) as they lay in comas. Bad Education (2004), a hot-house film noir about a drag queen (Gael Garcia Bernal) who tries to blackmail the predatory priest (Daniel Gimenz Cacho) who abused him as a Catholic school student, is a drama of damaged characters driven by anger and corruption which has been called his most personal film.
