La mala educacion

This is supposed to be the one no one likes. I think folks who came to his work via the last two are surprised to see the punk rock art fag from Madrid never went away. Don't mind the naysayers, the film is intelligent and sharp.
There's a coldness in the film that I haven't seen in Almodóvar's work before. A cruelty. The film is very unique, a kind of post-modern film noir in Technicolor. You won't have seen anything like it before. People have talked about how the narrative structure moves back and forth between 'real' time and 'story' time, ultimately leaving the boundaries between the two ambiguously defined. But the narrative is also interesting because, unlike the last two films, it doesn't exactly have a catharsis. A brilliant and cruel choice on Almodóvar's part because as a consequence you have to take the film with you. It lingers not only because of the power of its images, but also because you walk out of the theater still having to sort out your feelings. The film is also a return to his earlier work, it explores queerness head on, instead of obliquely, and also Catholic fetishes, but with a pronounced humanism that he's picked up in the last decade. I hope this film encourages people to reevaluate his early films, which I feel have been misread as zany or campy, but which I have always felt were much more emotionally complex.