Verdict: Spain's bad-boy filmmaker grows up with this humane celebration of nurturing women.

Details: Starring Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Penelope Cruz and Antonia San Juan. Rated R for language, drug content and sexuality, including strong sexual dialogue. In Spanish with subtitles. 1 hour, 41 minutes.

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Review: Drag queens, drug addicts, strong women, angry tears, erotic entanglements and knotty, naughty plotting: They're the usual elements in the movies of Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodovar ("Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown"). But in "All About My Mother," his trademark devices come together in unexpectedly poignant ways.

While his previous two films, "Live Flesh" and "The Flower of My Secret," showed the auteur in a maturing mood, in his new comedy-drama he reaches a new emotional depth that complements his signature playfulness. Often deeply ludicrous, it's just as often deeply moving.

A tribute to actresses (of all kinds), "Mother" is a virtually male-free fable with a title inspired by that backstage classic, "All About Eve." The movie's other main touchstone is "A Streetcar Named Desire," a play that Manuela (Cecilia Roth) takes her son Esteban (Eloy Azorin) to see for his 17th birthday. Starring as Blanche Dubois is Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), an actress of the glamorous old school whose autograph Esteban hopes to get. Chasing her taxi down the street, he's struck and killed by a car.

The coordinator of organ transplants at a Madrid hospital, Manuela finds herself on the receiving end of the counseling she offers bereaved families. It's the first of many deliberate echoes and coincidences in a movie built like a hall of mirrors, featuring characters who, like Blanche, come to depend on the kindness of strangers.

The grief-stricken Manuela travels to her old hometown, Barcelona, in search of Esteban's father, a man she always told her son was dead. That Manuela's ex-husband has renamed "herself" Lola is a good example of the off-kilter landscape Almodovar's characters occupy. The bizarre, organic Barcelona architecture of Antonio Gaudi creates a visual correlative to the movie's emotional temperature.

During her search for the elusive Lola, Manuela encounters her old friend Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a motormouthed transsexual hooker, and also Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a social-working nun coping with a strained relationship with her parents. (Rosa's father doesn't even recognize her on sight.)

Almodovar views family as something that is best provided by friends, not blood kin. As fate continues to twist for Manuela, she finds herself becoming a mother figure, in different ways, to Rosa and also to Huma. The actress hires Manuela as an assistant, unaware of her own indirect connection to Esteban's death.

When one of the "Streetcar" leads fails to show up, Huma asks Manuela if she can act. She says yes: "I can lie very well, and I'm used to improvising." Her words suggest that all women, through dealing with the caprices of the opposite sex, learn how to perform and play-act in self-defense.

The world of men is indicted by its absence in "Mother." Agrado and Lola even seem to be trying to escape that world through their voluntary gender-bending, though only one of them is successful. "Lola's got the worst of men and the worst of women," Manuela claims.

In "Mother," Almodovar fuses his love of artifice and exaggeration with deeper emotional resonance than ever before. The sets are the brightly colored eye candy he's always favored. But Roth's guttural wail of grief in the film's first half-hour is of an intensity we've never heard before in his work. (Roth, who has a fading, lived-in beauty, taps reserves of startling emotional complexity.) The movie also relishes the catty melodramatics that fuel the glossy 1950s women's films Almodovar clearly adores. Huma is a grande dame who can utter lines like "Smoke is all there's been in my life." Of her wayward, drug-using lover, she says, "She's hooked on junk, but I'm hooked on her."

By this point, you're likely to be hooked by a movie that can wink at its own campy sensibility while still grabbing you by the gut. Dark and tender in equal measures, it beautifully balances humor and heartache. Even when it's trafficking in sex jokes, it is informed by a grown-up understanding of the ways in which actions create consequences. "All About My Mother," which earned Almodovar the best director prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, celebrates the gift and burden of loving other people. It's a movie wise to the knowledge that grief brings growth, that life goes on, that even if the pain won't go away overnight, one day it goes.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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