Desire unlimited - Paul Julian Smith

Pedro Almodovar … winner of a BAFTA for Best Director, 2000

All About My Mother… Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, 2000

The huge international success of his latest feature,All About My Mother, has finally granted Pedro Almodovar the recognition he deserves, as the most artistically ambitious and commercially consistent film-maker in Europe.

Frequently comic, often deadly serious, always visually glorious, his films range from the screwball comedyWomen on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdownand the SM melodramaTie Me Up! Tie Me Down!to the almost classically austereLive Flesh. And, while questions of gender, nationality and sexuality have always been Almodovar's concern, new subjects have been addressed in his more recent work: the corrosive effects of a deregulated Spanish media, the transition from dictatorship to democracy and, inAll About My Mother, uncompromising explorations of the process of mourning.

This new edition includes four new chapters, among which is a rare interview with Almodovar himself, a new preface and additional illustrations. Still the only study of its kind in English, it vigorously confirms its original argument, that beneath Almodovar's genius for comedy and visual pleasure lies a film-maker whose work deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness.