Director: Pedro Almodóvar, 15, 121min
Stars: Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Bianca Portillo

On general release

Even the most sceptical critic cannot fail to be impressed by the craft that Almodóvar brings to his latest film.

Visually, it’s a creamy, unsubtle joy, and reunites the maestro with several of his favourite muses, including Maura, who literally haunts the film as a dead mother whose marble grave is polished by her grown-up children in the opening scene. Her death in a suspicious fire three years ago has left a smouldering mystery in a small hamlet in La Mancha. Her ghost, claim the local village women, stalks the midnight streets. Her daughter, Raimunda, played by Cruz (above, with María Isabel Díaz), is hardest hit by this hurtful gossip.

She is also the most preposterously glamorous hospital cleaner to set foot on screen, and Almodóvar manipulates the irony quite brilliantly. Cruz acts her grumpy heart out as a Dickensian single mother with batty aunts, a flaky sister, a cancerous best friend and a difficult teenage daughter (Yohana Cobo). But the camera speaks otherwise. The drooling shots of Cruz’s shapely buttocks, and the overhead close-ups of her cleavage — “the most spectacular in world cinema”, according to the director in the magazine Sight & Sound (and frankly, who am I to argue) — are mischievous distractions designed to wrong-foot the audience.

Gossip greases the guilty plot, and there are precious few men around to get in the way. An incestuous husband is knifed and parked in the freezer; a very undead-looking mum pops out from under the bed; and Cruz discovers a new avenue for adventure when she “borrows” an absent friend’s restaurant to ease her debts.

Almodóvar’s appetite for secrets and buried grief is not always easy to reconcile with his tacky wit and gushy sentiments — most of his films are as deep as Joe Orton plays. But this sassy female cast are a delight, in particular Cruz, who sheds her Hollywood shackles to deliver the performance of her career.