Pedro Almodóvar

Melodrama reclaimed and turned up. Almodóvar takes the disreputable machinery of soap — coincidence, secret parentage, coma, revenge — and plays it in saturated colour with complete sincerity, usually with women at the centre and desire treated as ordinary.

Signature

• Primary reds and greens; interiors designed to the millimetre.
• Women's solidarity as the emotional engine; men frequently absent or ruinous.
• Trans, gay and queer lives depicted as unremarkable rather than as subject.
• Film-within-film and story-within-story structures.