Sleeper Hit

It's tempting to see Pedro Almodóvar's career as one steady progression from early Warholian kitsch like Pepi, Luci, Bom to recent audience-pleasing, Oscar-winning standouts like All About My Mother. If so, then the breathtaking Talk To Her is easily his career apogee and deftly confirms his status as one of the world's foremost filmmakers. For here, within this deceptively simple tale of two comatose women—a bullfighter (flamenco-pop queen Rosario Flores) and a dance student (Leonor Watling)—and the men who look after them (Javier Cámara and Dario Grandinetti), Almodóvar has packed in more incident, more detail and more ambiguous emotional ache than most film-makers manage in a lifetime. Whether it's the interstitial silent movie The Shrinking Lover, the as-live rendition of "Cucurrucucu Paloma", the bullfights, the time-warping intertitles or the brazenly fractured narrative, this movie astounds.

DVD EXTRAS: Trailer, scene access, photo gallery.

Rating: 5 / 10

Retail dvd & video (pathe distribution ltd, widescreen)