Pedro Almodóvar is the most voted director on the list of Babelia about Spanish cinema of the last fifty years. Of its 23 feature films, the ranking Includes seven. They are, in this order: Women on the verge of a nervous attack (5th place), All about my mother (11º), What have I done to deserve this (17º), The Law of Desire (25º), Talk to her (32º), The flower of my secret (48º) y Bad education (49º). Almodóvar far exceeds the following most voted filmmakers: Luis García Berlanga, Iván Zulueta, Víctor Erice, José Luis Rope and Carla Simón.
Since his debut in 1980 with Pepi, Luci, Bom and other girls of the pile, The almodovarian filmography has traveled from the self -confidence of the underground Madrid of the eighties of the last century to the melancholic (and apocalyptic) New York sky of the XXI of his last work, The next room (2024). Between them he has created his own creative universe rooted in classic genres such as comedy, the noir or the melodrama in which the survey participants have had a lot to choose from.
The films voted respond to some of their most popular works. Although it is striking that two of his titles most appreciated by criticism and public, Return (2006) y Pain and glory (2020), have been left out. However, two of their most complex and risky films have entered: Talk to her (2002) y Bad education (2003), two key works of his filmography – to my judgment, essential in his stage of creative maturity – and have not stopped gaining weight over time. Also figure The flower of my secret (1995), one of her best dialogued films and in which the newly missing Marisa Paredes was her accomplice and alter ego.
Almodóvar’s footprint crosses the last half -Spanish and is not the first time Women on the verge of a nervous attack Heads the list of his best films. Released in 1988, two of his most important works precede it, What have I done to deserve this? (1984) y The Law of Desire (1987), both among the most voted, although it is Women… which definitively changed the international perception of the filmmaker.
Not only: it was fixed in popular memory for its mixture of comedy and melodrama-two waters in which its protagonist, Carmen Maura, was perfectly moved-and for many of his crazy dialogues and characters (of the “witness” of Jehovah Chus Lampreave al Mambo-Taxist Guillermo Montesinos). Also because in it some of Almodóvar’s hallmarks hatch: his taste for artifice and decorations; The red seal; his love for what happens in the kitchens (the gazpacho and the orfidals); the design (the coffee maker); Madrid as a sophisticated forillo or backdrop; your cinephilia (in this case, Johnny Guitar, of Nicholas Ray) or his obsession with The human voice, of Cocteau. Flash of a multiple identity: there are many almodóvares and this list is another proof of this.
