The Whole Almodóvar
All 23 of the Spanish director's feature films are newly available on demand. I rate every last one of them and tell you where to find them.
I don’t how it happened, but all of Pedro Almodóvar's feature films became available on demand this week, mostly as cheap rentals ($3 or so) on Amazon and Apple TV. And when I say all of his features, I mean every last one of the 23 full-length movies the great Spanish director has made, from 1980’s “Pepi, Luci, Bom” to last year’s “The Room Next Door.” Is the man on his deathbed? (It’s not an unreasonable surmise based on his most recent movies, many of which seems to have their eyes on the exits.) Did the rights lawyers untie some sort of arthouse Gordian knot? Maybe Almodovar just peremptorily waved his hand and exclaimed “Prográmelos a todos en streaming de video!”
However it has come about, this is a movie lover’s gain, and whether you’ve barely dipped your toe in the filmography or you’ve seen everything he’s done but wouldn’t mind a refresher course, now would be a good time to dig in. Almodóvar remains one of the sui generis artists in the history of the movies, a cinematic natural who inhaled decades of Hollywood and international melodramas, breathed them back out as day-glo revolutionary camp and then tinkered endlessly with the form over the next four decades, touching on tragedy and farce, horror and desire, kink and kindness. His scripts are gifts to actresses and the finished films lovingly recombine the DNA of classic Hollywood with barrier-breaking treatments of sexuality, gender, and womanhood – his movies are transgressions made with love.
In the new millennium, Almodóvar’s art has only matured, deepening with the sense that the melodramas we force ourselves and others to live are our only defense against the coming of the night. Fate is the eternal game in Late Almodóvar, and while we’re occasionally the players, more often we’re the game pieces, and the board is so marvelously alive with colors and absurdity and sadness.
I’m going to do something silly below and, for paid subscribers, rate the entire filmography, film by film, based on memories that in some cases go back to the 1980s. So take this with a shaker of salt, but maybe use it as a road map, too. Conveniently, Almodóvar’s work falls into distinct periods, each of which contains one or two gems (at least) and one or two duds (at most). For beginners, I’d recommend starting with Almodóvar's international breakthrough, “Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988) before moving on to “All About My Mother” (1999); “Volver” (2006); and “Pain and Glory” (2019), although any of the films rated ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2 and up will do.
