Viva Pedro: The Almodóvar Collection
Sony Pictures Classics

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In this wildly watchable box set of art films, flamboyant Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar (Volver) manages to sling together and humanize a rogues gallery of artists, rapists, transsexuals, priests, murderers and junkies. His two earliest movies included here have never before been released on DVD: The psycho-sexual NC-17-rated Matador (1986) introduces young Antonio Banderas in a love quadrangle between a bullfighter, his girlfriend, her rapist and his lawyer; and Law of Desire (1987) is a pansexual Hitchcockian thriller involving a screenwriter, his transsexual brother (Carmen Maura), the actor he loves unrequitedly and an obsessive fan. The campy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) feels like a play and fuses comedy and melodrama to establish Pedro as the reigning king of women's directors. Almodóvar first gets deep in 1995's seriocomic The Flower of My Secret about a suicidal romance novelist with a faltering marriage who adopts a pseudonym in order to lambaste her own work.

The revenge-fueled film noir Live Flesh (1997) intersects the stories of a reformed drug addict, her wheelchair-bound athlete husband (Javier Bardem) and the man who served time for shooting and paralyzing him. Brilliant grief melodrama All About My Mother (1999) starring then-unknown Penélope Cruz, and the poetically perverse Talk to Her (2002) about the odd friendship between two men caring for their comatose girlfriends, come next. The eighth movie, 2004's NC-17-rated Bad Education, revisits themes first explored in Law of Desire and stars Gael García Bernal in dual roles. This is a must-have for any lover of women or international cinema.

Only two of the eight movie disks -- Flower of My Secret and Bad Education -- include "making of" featurettes, and only Talk to Her and Bad Education offer director's commentary. These are the only places in the set you'll get testimony from the director's mouth. The ninth "Special Features" disk comprises three substantial, albeit Almodóvar-free, bonuses. The hour-long "Deconstructing Almodóvar" assembles his production team and actors -- including producer-brother Agustín, muse Carmen Maura and ingénue Penélope Cruz -- to explore the auteur's method, inspirations and themes. (Banderas's absence here is conspicuous.) The same talking heads laud his filmography in the 25-minute "Directed by Almodóvar" and summarize his biography in the 25-minute "Viva Pedro." The box packaging includes postcards of all eight films depicting the original Spanish one-sheet art.

by Rob. Walton