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The Films of Pedro Almodóvar Ranked

Finding the crux of a Pedro Almodóvar film is not unlike asking how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

The Films of Pedro Almodóvar Ranked
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Finding the crux of a Pedro Almodóvar film is not unlike asking how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. In each case, the supposed science of the issue at hand is often short-circuited by impatience. Lest the comparison seem too glib, Almodóvar’s entire filmography is, to varying degrees, about the performance of taste, where characters often relate to one another not through their minds, but through their fingers, eyes, and teeth. Sweet tooths are more than a matter of dental hygiene; they’re a means of defining personal placement within the broader spectrum of vivid characters and self-serving interests. The bright color scheme of Almodóvar’s mise-en-scène redoubles these matters by problematizing realism as a dissenting faction amid otherwise psychologically defined characters, whose motivations are typically for sustenance of a rather short-order sort. On that note, Almodóvar’s oeuvre, and the characters that comprise it, can perhaps be best summarized by Carmen Maura’s character in Matador, who says near the film’s end: “Some things are beyond reason. This is one of them.” Clayton Dillard

Editor’s Note: This entry was originally published on November 28, 2016.


The Films of Pedro Almodóvar Ranked

22. I’m So Excited! (2013)

The broad comedy of I’m So Excited! stays too comfortably on airplane mode throughout the film’s brisk runtime. It’s a deliberately frivolous, tossed-off effort, with middling jokes about barbiturates and musical numbers that pander, and too nakedly appeal, to camp impulses. These shortcomings are partially assuaged by the film’s sheer pep, especially as it becomes evident that actors like Javier Cámara and Carlos Areces are having a great deal of fun in their roles as unperturbed flight attendants, Joserra and Fajardo. Still, these fairly meager pleasures are unsatisfying consolation prizes when stacked against Almodóvar’s finest films, where there’s no evidence of an in-flight creative nap. Dillard


The Films of Pedro Almodóvar Ranked

21. Julieta (2016)

Arguably the most conventional film of Almodóvar’s career, Julieta consistently renders its titular character’s recollections in explicit terms as those of a conflicted woman whose life has been spent in the throes of filial grief. Lacking an exuberant production design, the film settles for a predictably varied visual palette that, at this point, operates only as a commercial selling point for Almodóvar’s directorial style. The screenplay’s unimaginative frame narrative isn’t helping matters either; instead of reconfiguring memory into emotionally resonant bursts or revelations of desire as in All About My Mother, Almodóvar opts for template melodrama, with cutaways to Julieta (Emma Suárez) literally scribing her recollections in the present tense. In a career defined by inventive methods of access to his characters’ lingering duress, Julieta is an unfortunately flat-footed step toward complacency. Dillard


What Have I Done to Deserve This?

20. What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984)

More compelling in theory than practice, What Have I Done to Deserve This? finds Almodóvar forgoing the punkish abandon of his earlier work for a calmer, if still rambunctious, domestic drama starring Carmen Maura as Gloria, a housewife whose husband and children have little respect for her. Almodóvar regular Chus Lampreave stands out as Gloria’s cupcake-hoarding mother-in-law, whose mitigating presence within the patriarchal family recalls a similar figure in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Master of the House, but several of the gags, whether a lizard being the only witness to a murder or a man’s demand for “elegant, sophisticated sadism…like in French films,” don’t resound with the same resourcefulness of those from Almodóvar’s sharpest farces. Dillard

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Broken Embraces

19. Broken Embraces (2009)

After the popular and critical success of Talk to Her and Volver, Almodóvar opted for a decidedly reflexive opus (Broken Embraces boasts the longest runtime in his oeuvre at 127 minutes) of self-indulgence, guided through time by the memories of Mateo (Lluís Homar), a blind filmmaker whose newfound creative partnership with the much younger Diego (Tamar Novas) breeds a series of episodes detailing past love affairs. Unwieldy by nature, Broken Embraces is in some sense the most sprawling presentation of Almodóvar’s telenovella revisionism, but the narrative net is cast so wide, and with such a decided but superficial emphasis on the tortured process of an artist, that few of the passages, let alone characters, are given the necessary affective space to blossom. Dillard


Kika

18. Kika (1993)

By the early 1990s, the stakes of both Almodóvar’s perceptions on contemporary sexuality and intertextual play with film history had necessarily reached a point of no return. If the director’s films were still going to be capable of shocking or at least surprising audiences, they would require a refreshed template, one informed by but not beholden to his films of the past decade. The first of those three efforts was Kika, a wholly postmodern experiment that collages bits and pieces of classical Hollywood with Almodóvar’s fearless bid to fuse rape, cunnilingus, and the music of Bernard Herrmann into a whirligig of excesses. While there’s a certain je ne sais quoi to the film’s sheer energy, there’s also a fundamental hole at its emotional core, with flattened characters and meandering visual motifs. Dillard


High Heels

17. High Heels (1991)

Not unlike Woody Allen’s Interiors, High Heels is an homage to the films of Ingmar Bergman (particularly Autumn Sonata, which is directly referenced) that’s softened, in part, by its direct, reverential address to the Swedish filmmaker. The story starts promisingly, with a flashback structure that splits its central character’s time between Mexico and Madrid during the 1970s, but it quickly converts these potentially sociopolitical tensions into a mother-daughter melodrama of a rather nondescript sort. While intentions of murder are most welcome in nearly any Almodóvar film, here those elements feel forced onto a final third that relies upon the titular heels for sentiment in place of antipathy. Dillard


The Flower of My Secret

16. The Flower of My Secret (1995)

Whereas Kika offers a deluge of painterly compositions, taboo subject matter, and revels in the sheer force of its excesses, The Flower of My Secret holsters those impulses for a calmer character piece about Leo (Marisa Paredes), author of several, popular romance novels, whose own sex life is filled with disaffected lovers and impotent men. It’s one of Almodóvar’s most tranquil films, and though it considers Leo’s sexual dissatisfaction with an attunement to her body’s craving for contact and a lasting embrace, it’s altogether too removed from its implicit critique of literature (and art) that lacks a sociocultural spine. The film is less a fastball than a warm-up pitch, a starter kit for the masterful melding of excesses and character emotion that are just a few films down the pike. Dillard

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Labyrinth of Passion

15. Labyrinth of Passion (1982)

Almodóvar has called Labyrinth of Passion “the most pop film I ever made,” and it’s easy to see why. The basic premise, following a nymphomaniac pop star named Sexi (Cecilia Roth), is but one leg of a gonzo tour through a variety of Madrid’s sex-minded inhabitants, including the gay son of a Middle Eastern emperor and Antonio Banderas as a rent-boy terrorist. Almodóvar even appears himself, fronting a punk band with musician McNamara in Ziggy Stardust-esque makeup, and singing “Suck It to Me” in English. The film’s wild-eyed vacillation between storylines lands not as a deliberate obfuscation of any singular narrative, but as several meaningful articulations of the ever-shifting sources of, and perspectives on, sex positivity during Spain’s Movida Madrileña period. Dillard


Pain and Glory

14. Pain and Glory (2019)

A film about an aging artist struggling to recapture his yen for creation, Pain and Glory has the makings of a deeply personal, career-capping work for Pedro Almodóvar. His name may be Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), but the gay filmmaker, with his tussled hair, white beard, and red turtleneck, may as well call himself Pedro. One of the very few differences between them is that Salvador has stopped making films while Almodóvar continues to work at a relatively steady clip. Pain and Glory is a ballsy admission on the Spanish auteur’s part that he hasn’t made a film in more than a decade that can compare with his most outrageous and subversive output, which makes it all the more dispiriting that his latest only occasionally captures the spry, comedic rhythms and impassioned, melodramatic intensity that defined Law of Desire and Bad Education. Still, however much Almodóvar’s formalist bona fides may have cooled, his ability to craft emotionally acute, achingly felt scenes between men in the throes of love is as vigorous as ever. Sam C. Mac


The Skin I Live In

13. The Skin I Live In (2011)

It’s easy to imagine an argument against The Skin I Live In, what with its cavalier depiction of rape and junky assessment of gender identity (many elements deliberately invoke The Silence of the Lambs), as a misguided provocation. However, making such a claim would ignore the outré politics of Almodóvar’s remarkably clear-headed revaluation of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face and its implicit indictment of French complicity in the Holocaust. Almodóvar uses Franju’s framework to offer a comparable charge against ideologically tinged treatments of sex, while simultaneously acknowledging that sexual liberation only yields political purpose if not practiced by psychopathic men, whether they’re physicians or dressed as lions. That potential reality, it seems, is the film’s core source of fantasy. Dillard


Pepi, Luci, Bom

12. Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980)

Almodóvar’s first feature displays an unwillingness to reign in its divisive content for the sake of argumentative clarity. Opening with a scene in which Superman, marijuana, and rape figure prominently, the film conceives of cultural desires of all sorts, whether covetous, consumptive, or libidinous, as absurdist tropes for examining free-spirited and sexually open human beings. Almodóvar also shows compassion for his struggling characters—a trait often missed in discussions of his earlier works. Late in the film, when Luci (Eva Siva) defiantly says, “I’m much more of a slut than you think I am,” it’s not a badge of honor so much as a plea to recognize some degree of human equality through shared bodily experience. Dillard

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Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

11. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

An ensemble in an Almodóvar film is far closer to a nightmarish family reunion than a nostalgic gathering. Pepa (Carmen Maura) is the glue holding this ramshackle carnival together, which features Lucía (Julieta Serrano), her husband’s clinically insane, potentially homicidal ex-wife. There’s also Marisa (Rossy de Palma), her son’s stuck-up fiancée, who passes out after unwittingly drinking some spiked gazpacho. And Candela (Maria Barranco), who’s riddled with paranoia from housing a Shiite terrorist, adds injury to insult by nearly throwing herself to her death from Pepa’s apartment balcony. Almodóvar’s progressively unhinged mystery tale includes gunshots, sleuthing in phone booths, an airplane hijacking, and a hilarious scene with actors dubbing a scene from Johnny Guitar into Spanish. Dillard


Live Flesh

10. Live Flesh (1997)

Almodóvar’s films sometimes display noirish sensibilities, but Live Flesh is his only straight-up noir, with a two-decade spanning story that pits a paralyzed police officer (Javier Bardem) against his assailant (Liberto Ribal) years after their initial, violent confrontation. Yet that’s only a piece of this winding tale that begins with a title card explaining Franco-era restrictions on citizens rights and ends in late-’90s Madrid, under the monochromatic reds of street lights on rain-soaked sidewalks. Far from an empty pastiche, the film thrillingly navigates its characters’ complicated sexual hang-ups and confronts crippled masculinity without the slightest sentiment whatsoever. The femme fatale becomes an homme fatale, and Almodóvar transforms the archetypes of noir into a tale specific to a nation still dealing, and in part reeling, from Franco’s legacy. Dillard


Talk to Her

9. Talk to Her (2002)

Perhaps the densest screenplay Almodóvar has ever written, Talk to Her is also nakedly cinephilic in its overt construction as an ode to the senses. Whether comatose, repressed, or imprisoned, the core quartet of characters are wholly defined by their oscillating state of mind, though it’s consistently two men, given their ultimate care over a pair of women, that control any given situation. The scenario could easily be read as an allegory for Almodóvar’s control as a filmmaker, but stopping there would only gloss the film’s complicating interludes. Thus, when a scene from a fictional silent film shows a shrunken man crawling into a woman’s vagina, it isn’t an oddball nostalgia trip, but evidence of Almodóvar’s unceasing commitment to revealing the frequently contradictory complexities of sexual identity. Dillard


Parallel Mothers

8. Parallel Mothers (2021)

Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers is haunted by absences, by how a country informs its citizens’ psyches on a granular level. Its central mystery involves the connection between a woman’s quest to recover the bones of ancestors who were murdered and mass-buried during the Spanish Civil War, and two new mothers’ attempts to make peace with their families. The cross-associations that Almodóvar weaves between these threads are startling, suggesting the ripple effects that are inherent in even casual interactions. The filmmaker creates a slipstream of history, art, architecture, and lineage, folding every element of his society effortlessly into one of his most robust and moving melodramas. Almodóvar deftly establishes a potentially convoluted setup with Parallel Mothers. In the tradition of Sirk and Hitchcock, he’s become a master of crafting scenes that casually reverberate with endless levels of subtext. Quite a bit happens in this film, and much of it doesn’t need to be revealed, except to say that Almodóvar continues to toy with notions of heritage and erasure. The film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Almodóvar understands to be one in the same. Chuck Bowen

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Law of Desire

7. Law of Desire (1987)

Law of Desire is less a title than a rule in Almodóvar’s über-kinky thriller about Pablo (Eusebio Poncela), a stage director, and the psychotic rapist/serial killer (Antonio Banderas) who becomes fixated on him. The pair’s dimly lit, sweaty sex scenes contrast Almodóvar’s otherwise candy-colored mise-en-scène, like the expressionistic greens and reds that bleed into Pablo’s production of Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine. Containing two of Almodóvar’s recurring emblems of masculinity (the libidinous artist and the sex-minded, psychopathic stud), the film intersects art, fucking, and madness (Almodóvar’s holy trinity) into a dastardly renunciation of good taste that is further explored in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Bad Education. Dillard


Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

6. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990)

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! delivers on Law of Desire’s reference to Cocteau by taking the form of a farcical Beauty and the Beast narrative, with Marina (Victoria Abril), a former heroin junkie and porn star turned B-movie actress, being held captive by a superfan, Ricky (Antonio Banderas). Stockholm syndrome has probably never been rendered with such sumptuous consideration for the frame, as cinematographer José Luis Alcaine manages degrees of realism and fantasy in equal measure, turning even the confines of Marina’s domestic apartment into a carnivalesque plethora of signifiers and connotations. The film is Almodóvar’s Body Double, in that it finds the director simultaneously reflexive and deliriously irreverent, taking various strands of his previous films to several of their most perverse conclusions. Dillard


Dark Habits

5. Dark Habits (1983)

Almodóvar has never met a boundary that couldn’t be crossed. There’s little better evidence of this in the director’s oeuvre than Dark Habits, its title a pun on the vice inside a convent called the Humiliated Redeemers. The film features nuns shooting heroin, peeping through keyholes, and gossiping about Yolanda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual), a cabaret singer who’s given temporary refuge at the convent in order to elude police. There she meets Sister Damned, Sister Manure, Sister Snake, and Sister Sewer Rat: they’re the dwarves to Yolanda’s Sister Snow White. Almodóvar routes his invigorated tale of forbidden love between Yolanda and the Mother Superior through a trenchant, and frequently hilarious, satire of organized religion’s repressive, absurd effects on an ideologically shackled, post-Franco Spanish culture striving for sexual liberation. Dillard


Volver

4. Volver (2006)

If the camaraderie of women forms a significant portion of Almodóvar’s aesthetic interests, then Volver is perhaps the most pleasurable, and accessible, expression of those aims. It’s also a showcase for Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura as two generations of women whose meeting doubles as a two-decade bridge from What Have I Done to Deserve This? to the present: a changing of the guard from one iconic performer to another. It’s an altogether warm, glowing film, but by no means neutered in its first half-hour’s threat of sexual violence. The second half is tinged with melancholy for lost loved ones, but never dips into outright eulogizing. It’s indicative of Almodóvar’s keenest reflexive impulses, where nostalgia is reworked into recognition of collaboration as the ultimate source of artistic pleasure. Dillard

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Matador

3. Matador (1986)

Hand on cock, eyes on Bava—no Almodóvar film opens as perversely, and so thoroughly forgoes middlebrow accessibility, as Matador. Almodóvar stages Diego (Nacho Martínez) stretching from a chair, his heels propped atop a TV set, and jerking off to the goriest scenes from Blood and Black Lace like it’s a routine evening at home watching his favorite sitcom. A tale of bullfighting and romance only in passing, little holds water (but plenty spills blood) in Almodóvar’s greatest ’80s film. It’s an apogee of queer psychosexual scenarios that plays out like a gialli, in part, but is unmistakably an inaugural culmination of the director’s virulent skewering of bourgeois aesthetics—including diligent homage. Some have asked if Bava would have condoned such an appropriation of his own film. Almodóvar’s razor-edged brio suggests he couldn’t care less. Dillard


Bad Education

2. Bad Education (2004)

The recent Nocturnal Animals nearly lifts its entire narrative structure from Almodóvar’s most seductive film, but manages none of its intimacy or insight regarding institutional corruption. Both films are about art and its assaultive capabilities, yet Bad Education, attuned to the remonstrative implications of its story’s sexual violations, routes its perceptions through the loins of its male characters, whose insuperable appetites for sex are less about the pleasure of the flesh than an assertion of power. These include grown men, their younger selves, and members of the clergy, though Almodóvar’s pursuit is less a bald castigation of religious hypocrisy than performing a sinuous arabesque of betrayals that run generations into the past. It’s both an allegory for the ideological stranglehold of art and an explicit evocation of it; Bad Education is Almodóvar’s most masterful thesis on the often invisible line between interior and exterior, whether relating to art and lived experience, one’s own body, or the actual unfolding of the film itself. The film’s sexiness exceeds a display of skin to include a remarkable understanding of how being led astray can be the best path to self-discovery—that is, if it doesn’t kill (or irreparably traumatize) you first. To paraphrase Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet: Here’s to your fuck, Pedro. Dillard


All About My Mother

1. All About My Mother (1999)

The playfulness of Almodóvar’s ’90s films, which often dabble in visual experimentation and non sequiturs at the expense of narrative cohesion, finally found acute precision with All About My Mother, a film in which each scene builds so fittingly upon the last, that its unfolding finally overwhelms for the depths of its reach. An early viewing of All About Eve by Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and her son, Esteban (Eloy Azorín), doubles as a primer for how to understand the subsequent events. They directly relate at several points to jealousy and dwindling stardom, but also sensuality, as an imperative on the placement of personal desire, whether sexual or emotional, within the larger spectrum of the cosmos. Yes, All About My Mother is about the stars and how miniscule those who gaze upon them are made to feel without a place of their own. When Ismaël Lo’s “Tajabone” plays as Manuela drives in circles at night, searching amid numerous, anonymous sex acts, it’s a distillation of Almodóvar’s existential sojourn, of paradoxically reclaiming oneself and letting go: We call it cinema. Dillard

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