Metrograph

Capping an incredible eight-year creative partnership with Almodóvar, repeat collaborator Carmen Maura here plays voice actress Pepa, who, abandoned by her lover, has resolved to kill herself by downing a batch of gazpacho laced with sleeping pills. That’s just the start of the orgy of unhinged behavior that makes up Almodóvar’s gaudy, cheeky screwball melodrama about Shiite terrorist cells and romance on the rocks, a camp romp celebration of emotional excess that has all the makings of an obscure cult classic, yet improbably became the highest-grossing Spanish film of all time upon release, and did its part in putting co-star Antonio Banderas on the international stage.