An actress abandoned by her lover, a suitcase, a batch of gazpacho spiked with barbiturates and a burning bed (1988)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) — his international breakthrough
Film · European
Pedro Almodóvar
born 1949 · Spanish
La Movida Madrileña; post-Franco melodrama
Pedro Almodóvar emerged from La Movida Madrileña, the explosion of countercultural life in Madrid after Franco's death, and turned a punkish, camp comic style into the most internationally successful Spanish cinema of the modern era. His films are saturated-colour melodramas about mothers, desire, transgender identity and the recovery of the past, and he has won Oscars for both screenwriting and Best Foreign Language Film.
How to spot them
- ▸Fierce reds and greens, patterned kitchens, and a story built around a mother or a substitute for one
- ▸La Movida Madrileña, the Madrid counterculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s
- ▸Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, Rossy de Palma, Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Marisa Paredes
- ▸Produced by El Deseo, the company he runs with his brother Agustín
- ▸Alberto Iglesias's scores; films-within-films, coincidences, and a bus or a plane full of song
Key films
A mother travels from Madrid to Barcelona after her son is killed chasing an autograph, and finds an actress, a pregnant nun and a transgender woman called Lola (1999)
All About My Mother — the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director at Cannes
A nurse and a bullfighting journalist beside two women in comas, with an inset silent film in which a man shrinks and climbs inside a woman (2002)
Talk to Her (Hable con ella) — it won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay
A mother thought dead returns to a La Mancha kitchen, and her daughter mimes a tango about the past (2006)
Volver — Best Screenplay at Cannes, and a Best Actress prize shared by the whole female cast
A plastic surgeon keeps a captive in a flawless synthetic skin of his own invention (2011)
The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) — his return to work with Antonio Banderas after twenty-one years
An ageing film director with a ruined back, an old lover and a return to heroin; the leading man won Best Actor at Cannes (2019)
Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) — Antonio Banderas as the director's obvious stand-in
Two old friends in New York, one helping the other to die on her own terms; the director's first feature in English (2024)
The Room Next Door — Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore; it won the Golden Lion at Venice
A tragicomedy of a stalled creative life, shot between Madrid and Lanzarote and released in Spain in the spring of 2026 (2026)
Bitter Christmas (Amarga Navidad)
Key ideas
- Melodrama taken seriously: the woman's picture of Douglas Sirk remade with queer and transgender lives at its centre
- Motherhood as the organising force of a life, and of a plot
- The past is never dead in Spain; his films keep digging things up, sometimes literally
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Calzada de Calatrava, Ciudad Real, in 1949; he moved to Madrid at 17 and worked for the national telephone company for a dozen years
- •He sold second-hand goods at the Rastro market and performed with the punk-glam duo Almodóvar y McNamara
- •His company El Deseo, founded in 1986, is run with his brother Agustín Almodóvar
- •He has won two competitive Oscars: Best Foreign Language Film (All About My Mother) and Best Original Screenplay (Talk to Her)
- •At Cannes he has won Best Director (1999) and Best Screenplay (2006)
- •Penélope Cruz was nominated for Best Actress for Volver, the first Spanish woman nominated in that category
- •The Room Next Door won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2024
- •Now 77, he is still directing; Bitter Christmas opened in Spanish cinemas in March 2026
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Festival de Cannes — Pedro Almodóvar — awards and selections
- Screen International — 'Bitter Christmas' review