Financial Times on Almodovar's "La Mala Educacion":

We know what to expect from the unerring hand of Pedro Almodóvar: a cinema steeped in emotional extremes that delights in tricks and contradiction and that coaxes us into the moral quicksand of contemporary life with such dexterity we barely notice our feet getting damp.

How does he manage it? The melodramatic plot twists, the reckless celebration of sexuality in all its shapes and forms, the garish colours - it should be a recipe for the most ghastly exercise in high camp.

Yet, it invariably works: the melodrama hums with authenticity, the pan-sexual cavortings resonate with feeling, the primary hues shimmer stylishly, in perfect empathy with the vivid entanglements cast before us.

So when we hear that Bad Education is an emotional triangle, we are duly forewarned. We know it will be more of a psycho-sexual, three-dimensional dodecahedron of head-spinning complexity and brutal frankness; and yet, we will care.

True, there is a triangle at the heart of the tale, one involving a Catholic priest and two under-age boys - nothing too controversial there, then. But Almodóvar structures his story with such understated cleverness, shifting time frames, stories within stories, that we are never quite sure of our ground.