There probably aren't many film directors who can tackle the subject of rape, head on, and manage to get a laugh. Well I think Pedro Almodóvar just about manages that here thanks to an amiably strong performance from the eponymous make-up artist (Verónique Forqué). We first meet her when she is drafted in by her lover "Nicholas" (Peter Coyote) to dress the corpse of his son "Ramón" (Àlex Casanovas). What might have helped would have been for the young man to actually be dead! Next thing, he is proposing to her - unaware of the thing with his dad - and they are living together. Happy ending? Well no, because it turns out that his mother killed herself - or did she? Star of red-top television "Scarface" (the super-hammy Victoria Abril) lives across the road and when not cavaliering around on her motorbike dressed like a mobile outside broadcast truck, she is rather voyeuristically filming from her terrace and finally, there's the horny porn star "Pablo" (Santiago Lajusticia) whose record is four times consecutively and who knows how he likes to eat an orange segment. It is maybe just that the whole film's dark comedy is in such shocking bad taste that it sort of works. There's a vague mystery underpinning the thing, but essentially this is just a chance for the over-the-top Forqué to present a character that takes the rise out of the excesses of femininity and masculinity quite engagingly. Her life is a mess, but it's a quirky mess and it's her's! Indeed, just about everyone's life here is a bit a shambles and I found it quite fun as we wade about through them all. It's a bit rough around the edges, and Coyote isn't the best, but it is an eclectic character study that I quite enjoyed.
A man who escaped from a prison comes to his inmate's village to find his wife, after having been told how wonderful she is. He hides at her place only to find out that she receives "night visits" from the village men. He starts a killing spree, causing panic among the locals.
Once an architect, Frank Bannister now passes himself off as an exorcist of evil spirits. To bolster his facade, he claims his "special" gift is the result of a car accident that killed his wife. But what he does not count on is more people dying in the small town where he lives. As he tries to piece together the supernatural mystery of these killings, he falls in love with the wife of one of the victims and deals with a crazy FBI agent.
6th-grader Terkel begins experiencing a streak of bad luck after sitting on a black spider. His teacher dies and is replaced by the strange Justin. At home, Terkel's Uncle Stewart erupts in sporadic fits of rage, and at school Terkel is bullied by two boys after they learn that fat Doris likes him. On a school camping trip, Terkel begins receiving death threats and must figure out who wants to kill him.
Itinerant projection-equipment repairman Bruno Winter and depressed hitchhiker Robert Lander - a doctor who has just been through a break-up with his wife and a half-hearted suicide attempt - travel along the Western side of the East-German border in a repair truck, visiting worn-out movie theaters, learning to communicate across their differences.
Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman.
There is a big charity function at the house of Mrs. Cheyney and a lot of society is present. With her rich husband, deceased, rich old Lord Elton and playboy Lord Arthur Dilling are both very interested in the mysterious Fay. Invited to the house of Mrs. Webley, Fay is again the center of attention for Arthur and Elton with her leaning towards stuffy old Elton. When Arthur sees Charles, Fay's Butler, lurking in the gardens, he remembers that Charles was a thief caught in Monte Carlo and he figures that Fay may be more interested in the pearls of Mrs. Webley, which she is. After Fay takes the pearls, but before she can toss them out the window, she is caught by Arthur who is very disappointed in how things are turning out.
Two men share an odd friendship while they care for two women who are both in deep comas.
Following the tragic death of her teenage son, Manuela travels from Madrid to Barcelona in an attempt to contact the long-estranged father the boy never knew. She reunites with an old friend, an outspoken transgender sex worker, and befriends a troubled actress and a pregnant, HIV-positive nun.
Polish immigrant Karol Karol finds himself out of a marriage, a job and a country when his French wife, Dominique, divorces him after six months due to his impotence. Forced to leave France after losing the business they jointly owned, Karol enlists fellow Polish expatriate Mikołaj to smuggle him back to their homeland.
Kresten, newly wed, is on the threshold of a great career success in his father-in-law´s company. But when the death of his own father takes him back to his poverty-stricken childhood home, far out in the country, his career plans fall apart. For one thing he has to deal with his loveable, backward brother, who is now all alone; for another, he meets a stunning woman who comes to the farm as a housekeeper, in disguise of her real profession as a call-girl.
Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, know love, the movies and fear in a religious school at the beginning of the 1960s. Father Manolo, director of the school and its professor of literature, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three are followed through the next few decades, their reunion marking life and death.