This elegant film, starring Penelope Cruz is a stylish and visual feast, it’s also a delicate jigsaw of a plot that pulls itself tighter and tighter around all the characters until it’s almost unbearably intimate. 

Director Almodovar knows what he’s doing with film and there’s no doubt that, yet again, he has produced an engaging, fun, emotionally and visually beautiful film as he does time and time again. 

The main characters in this film – a blind director (Luis Homar) has a passionate affair with an actress (Cruz) who’s also his muse/lover. Everyone else is tangled up in this too, and secret’s, questions, stories and motives are revealed and hidden with an almost flirtatious grace.

Almodovar knows how to set his pace, the story is compelling and the performances convincing.

It’s a story within a story, a film within a film within a film, but this is what we have come to expect from Senor Almodovar.  Twisty narrative is his dance. His mirroring, self replicating and parallel stories are the grain that runs through this story. 

There’s a rich seam of Hitchcock Film Noir running through this film with endless references and jokes to other films.

He even goes as far as to use one of his earlier films for the film being made within this film. It adds rather than spoils the plot. It’s a comedy looking for a way out, a Film Noir threatening to be funny. 

It’s odd and captivating and I enjoyed it immensely. All the supporting actors are excellent and have a broody presence to even the merest glance.  The music is atmospheric, the sets vivid and the scenes shot on location in Lanzarote are breathtaking.

Pedro Almodovar's previous films have been so very good that it’s difficult to say if this is a ‘great film’, it’s certainly a good film and worth watching but when you’ve been as good as Mr Almodovar has in the past it raises the expectations.  I didn’t feel let down, just distracted, but then he goes and kills the main actress, with no warning, and once again I feel in good hands. Oh Mr Almadova you’re spoiling us.

Out now at the Duke of York’s Cinema:
www.picturehouses.co.uk/cinema_home_date.aspx?venueId=doyb

And on nationwide release from August 28