Pedro Almodóvar’s films – ranked!
22. I’m So Excited! (2013)
Airline staff and passengers take drugs and act out their sexual fantasies as their plane prepares for an emergency landing. Not so much Airplane! as a sexed-up The High Life, but frothier. Best watched with tequila, poppers and the campest chums you can find.
21. Kika (1993)
Almodóvar showed signs of selfparody in this melodrama about a makeup artist involved with a novelist, his stepson, a crime reporter, a serial killer subplot and some insane Jean Paul Gaultier outfits. There’s a 20minute rape scene, played for laughs; on the other hand, Almodóvar’s colourcoordinated cushion game is sublime.
20. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989)
Almodóvar claimed this comic melodrama was a metaphor for the bonds of coexistence, but watching an ex-porn actor (Victoria Abril) being beaten and gagged is not everyone’s idea of fun. And before you know it, she has fallen in love with her crazy kidnapper, played by adorable Antonio Banderas. Oh dear. But Abril’s scene with the toy scuba diver is one for the kinky erotic archives.
19. Labyrinth of Passion (1982)
Cecilia Roth plays a nymphomaniac pop star who finds true love with a gay prince masquerading as a punk singer in this dry run for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Almodóvar throws in everything but the kitchen sink, including some lighthearted rape and incest, and Banderas, in his Almodóvar debut, as a terrorist.
18. High Heels (1991)
Abril plays a Lagerfeld-clad TV newsreader whose long-running rivalry with her mother, a famous singer, gets even more complicated when her husband is murdered. Another dispatch from the era when Almodóvar was polishing his craft while dabbling in self-parody. Compensations include a smashing jail yard dance number and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score.
17. Dark Habits (1983)
When her boyfriend overdoses, a cabaret singer seeks refuge in a convent run by a heroin-sniffing lesbian mother superior and populated by nuns who secretly write lurid novels, take LSD and hang out with tigers. It’s a hot mess, but Almodóvar’s affection for his flawed characters (all performers from his rep company) is endearing.
16. Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom (1980)
Almodóvar’s 8mm feature debut, Fuck ... Fuck ... Fuck Me Tim!, was never released commercially, but this follow-up, shot on 16mm but blown up to 35mm, became one of the cult hits of La Movida Madrileña, the Madridbased movement trashing the legacy of Franco in a riot of sex, drugs and gender fluidity. Carmen Maura, the director’s 80s muse, plays Pepi, whose revenge on the cop who rapes her involves persuading a punk chanteuse to pee on his wife. Almodóvar plays the host of a penis-measuring contest. It’s crude, chaotic and fizzing with the sort of DIY energy familiar from early work by John Waters and Derek Jarman, with many of Almodóvar’s signature touches (pastiche TV ads, matching accessories, director cameos) already in evidence – though the taboo-busting also includes domestic violence presented as a source of humour.
15. What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984)
Maura plays Gloria, a cash-strapped housewife, in Almodóvar’s homage to Italian neorealism set in and around a dingy apartment block. One pubescent son deals drugs, the other moves in with a paedophile dentist. Maura is wonderful as always, and Chus Lampreave, another Almodóvar regular, is delightful as her eccentric mother-inlaw.
14. Law of Desire (1987)
Almodóvar’s pell-mell approach to plot was starting to cohere when he made this triangular romance about a gay film director, his young lover and an obsessive fan (Banderas) who tips the drama into psychothriller territory. Also on hand is Maura as the director’s transgender sister, who stars in her brother’s stage production of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice.
13. The Human Voice (2020)
Almodóvar, who had already riffed on Cocteau’s play in Law of Desire and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, made this more direct adaptation, his first film in English, during the pandemic lockdown. It’s essentially a 30-minute monologue by Tilda Swinton, modelling Balenciaga hoop skirts and Chanel bags as she waits in a luxurious apartment for her ex-lover to come back and claim his suitcase. But forget the product placement and enjoy a super canine performance by an Australian shepherd called Dash.
12. Bad Education (2004)
Gael García Bernal plays three roles in this multi-layered noir-esque imbroglio of murder and imposture, and also looks fabulous as a trans drag artiste in show-stopping Gaultier sequins. The nesting-doll-style plot involves boyhood friendship, an abusive priest and blackmail. There’s so much happening it seems churlish to point out that it doesn’t quite gel, but there’s barely a dull moment.
11. Matador (1986)
Almodóvar goes full-on kitsch in a preposterous black comedy that begins with a man masturbating to a slasher video, and develops into amour fou between two serial killers: a female lawyer and an ex-matador who both get turned on by the 40s western Duel in the Sun. Banderas plays a psychic bullfighting student who bungles a sexual assault by fainting.
10. Broken Embraces (2009)
Two timelines intertwine in this meta-homage to film-making. A blind director reminisces about his romance with his leading female actor, with visually ravishing results that include Penélope Cruz at absolute peak gorgeousness.
9. Volver (2006)
Cruz displays magnificent cleavage in this comedy-drama about two sisters with some very complicated family secrets, some of which are laid bare by the ghost of their mother, played by Maura in her first Almodóvar film for 18 years. With subplots shooting off in all directions, it’s like stumbling into a mid-season episode of a long-running soap opera, but the saturated colour, female solidarity and delicious Spanish cuisine make it a pleasurable jaunt.
8. All About My Mother (1999)
A stellar lineup of Almodóvar favourites (Cruz, Roth, Marisa Paredes) operating at full throttle makes this the sort of lush, femme-centric melodrama not seen since the heyday of Cukor and Mankiewicz. A bereaved woman becomes surrogate mother to an actor, junkie, pregnant nun and cross-dressing sex worker. There are so many characters and subplots that it doesn’t quite click, but it warms the cockles, and only a visual genius would dream of teaming that red hair with those red curtains.
7. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
The success of this screwball farce elevated Almodóvar from cult figure to arthouse darling. Maura stars as Pepa, waiting for her ex-lover to collect his suitcase from their Madrid penthouse (another riff on The Human Voice). Unwanted visitors, a vengeful ex-wife, spiked gazpacho and terrorism jostle for position on the farce-o-meter, with the director’s visual instincts demonstrating that, sometimes, colour-coordinated accessories can be as valid an aesthetic choice as any amount of fancy camerawork.
6. The Flower of My Secret (1995)
Paredes plays a writer suffering a midlife crisis. Her marriage is crumbling, she’s hitting the bottle and is tired of churning out cheap romances. Almodóvar revisits his perennial theme of men behaving badly and women struggling to cope, but there are signs he is entering a new, more assured phase of his career. Alberto Iglesias provides the beautiful score, the first of his 13 (to date) collaborations with Almodóvar.
5. Talk to Her (2002)
A discursive portrait of friendship between two men and the comatose women they love: a dancer and a matador. Incidental pleasures include Pina Bausch and a silent movie-style vignette about a miniature man who seeks refuge in his lover’s vagina. Enthralling, emotionally complex – and infinitely troubling in its sympathetic depiction of a stalker and rapist.
4. The Skin I Live In (2011)
Banderas plays a plastic surgeon who keeps a young woman captive in his luxurious villa. Expository flashbacks lead the viewer through a labyrinthine yarn of rape, revenge, desire, dead bodies and fabulous decor. Almodóvar’s favourite themes are all present and correct, but reshuffled into the nearest he has come to a horror film.
3. Live Flesh (1997)
Almodóvar turns Ruth Rendell’s chilly psychothriller into a passionate “Almodrama” (a term coined by